Hello, NVidia team! I posted this bug over on the Mint Forums in September. When playing multichannel (e.g. 5.1 surround) music, the audio randomly drops out. I wonder if it had something to do with HDMI implementation in the NVIDIA driver. Perhaps a handshake issue?
I experienced this bug in Ubuntu for over 8 years, and that finally went away when I switched to Mint in 2017. In September, it started happening in Mint, too.
I have since moved to Germany and set up a new 7.1 system here with all-new HDMI cables and a new receiver. Issue still occurs. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
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Steps to Reproduce:
- Start up Linux Mint 19
- Launch e.g. VLC, SMPlayer, Parole or similar
- Listen to multichannel music (e.g. 4.0, 5.1, 7.1 surround) until issue occurs
Current Results:
While listening to multichannel music (e.g. in FLAC format, or .mka, .mkv, .ac3, .dts, .iso…), there are occasional audio dropouts.
Expected Results:
All music should play back without issue.
Notes:
- Repro rate: unpredictable. Sometimes no issue for days, sometimes 3-4 dropouts in just 5-6 consecutive songs
- Issue never occurs at the same point in a song twice
- Issue used to occur in Ubuntu when I was using it between March 2009 and November 2017
- Issue stopped occurring when I switched to Mint in November 2017
- Issue first encountered in Mint on September 8, 2018
- Issue occurs on both my desktop and laptop PC (encountered on Sep 8th and 9th, 2018, respectively, and again since setting up my new 7.1 system on Nov 19th)
- Issue never encountered in stereo music in MP3, OGG or FLAC format.
Resources:
- This is what the dropout sounds like: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/attachment/ticket/21102/audio-dropout-example2.flac
- The following bug in VLC has similar symptoms, but only happens with faulty FLAC files and has a 100% repro rate: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/21102
- Back in January, on an unrelated matter, I did some research on Mint's audio implemenation and found that it uses different codecs than Ubuntu ("lavc:" as opposed to "ffmpeg", fwiw). I thought they might be the reason Mint never had these dropouts. Has anything about these codecs been changed with a recent Mint update? I don't see them installed anymore when checking the codecs list in SMPlayer. Cf. this Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/linuxmintmembers/permalink/10157037652629358/
- Bug report/thread in Mint Forums: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=277245&p=1523743#p1523743
Free 5.1 multichannel music available here:
https://gumroad.com/l/surround/free
https://www.lynnemusic.com/surround.html
Hardware specs - my desktop PC:
Sound device: NVidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti (HDMI out)
Playback hardware: Denon AVR-X1400H 7.2 surround receiver (HDMI in)
RAM: 32 GB
CPU: Intel Core i7-4970K (4.00GHz x4)
NVIDIA driver: 396.54
Hardware specs - my laptop PC:
Sound device: NVidia GeForce GTX 980M (HDMI out)
Playback hardware: Denon AVR-X1400H 7.2 surround receiver (HDMI in)
RAM: 32 GB
CPU: Intel Core i7-4710HQ (2.5GHz x4)
NVIDIA driver: 396.54
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (150 KB)