[mythtv] Unusual HD activity (from Myth itself?) causes prebuffering pause

Thomas Börkel thomas at boerkel.de
Thu Sep 9 02:22:59 EDT 2004


HI!

While watching a prerecorded show, suddenly playback stutters and there 
is more HD activity than usual during playback. Mythfrontend writes 
"prebuffering pause" to the console several times.

This effect has happened to me 3 times in the last 3 weeks, but I can 
not say, what's the cause, because I did not even manage to login via 
ssh and do a "top" before the effect went away by itself (lasted about 1 
minute). After that, top showed nothing unusual, no excessive CPU, RAM 
or swap usage.

There is nothing in mythbackend.log and nothing in /var/log/messages.

The recording itself is OK, it's a playback issue.

The only thing that I changed lastly, is activating kerneldeint.

Things that I think I know:
- should not have been another process, it's a dedicated Myth box
- it's not related to recording at the same time (there was none running)
- all 3 times, it was a large recording (> 2h)
- pressing pause stopped HD activity


May-be related info:
- one box for frontend and backend
- filesystem for recordings partition is XFS
- using NVidia (4363) TV-out with XV
- commercial flagging is OFF
- extra audio buffer is ON
- jitter reduce is ON
- kerneldeint is ACTIVE
- create preview image is at 7 minutes

System:
- Myth 0.15.1
- Fecora Core 1
- Kernel 2.4, 2197
- ivtv 0.1.10pre2 ck36c
- 512 MB RAM, Celeron 2.6 GHz
- running Myth since february

If this is a known problem that is fixed in 0.16, then OK. Otherwise, 
how could I pinpoint the problem?

Thanks!

Thomas



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list