Hi. Xine seems to have a problem with ac3 audio dropping out frequently, which ruins the ability to watch hdtv for example. I have made a sample which exhibits this problem, which plays just fine in mplayer so I assume that means root causes such as a buggy system scheduler can be ruled out. The sample also plays fine on my main Windows desktop as well. Adjusting things such as engine.buffers.audio_num_buffers in xine's config has no affect. It has been suggested that the problem may be xine not properly handling a stream error.

If anyone can and is willing to take a look at this and hopefully resolve the problem once and for all, that would be great. The sample is 20MB so it can't be attached to this post. Until I can find a better place to host the sample, I've temporarily uploaded it to: http://rapidshare.com/files/415479559/xine_ac3_dropout_bug.tar.bz2

System details are:

debian testing stable kernel 2.6.35.3 (quiet notsc clocksource=hpet) gcc 4.4.4-8 alsa-base 1.0.23+dfsg-1 alsa-utils 1.0.23-2 xine-lib-1.2 hg r11577 xine-ui hg r3054 VDR-1.7.15 mplayer-nogui 2:1.0~rc3++svn20100804-0.0

I recently tried the notsc and clocksource=hpet kernel options, which also had no affect. I want to reiterate that the dropout problem only occurs in xine. The error I see in the xine log when the dropout occurs is: pcm_hw.c: snd_pcm_hw_delay() SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_DELAY failed (-32).

Best regards, Derek