[mythtv] Debugging Unreliable DCT-6200 Recording

Kevin Kuphal kuphal at dls.net
Fri Sep 23 13:44:53 UTC 2005


jrandall at ftrd.us wrote:

> Jim,
>
> Thanks for the input on this.
>
> For me, your fix only works for live tv.  I had been doing basically  
> the same thing before, although it's usually faster for me to skip  
> using test-mpeg2 and just go for a few tries with mythfrontend.  The  
> timeout is longer, but I haven't observed any relationship between  
> getting things going correctly with test-mpeg2 and then having them  
> subsequently work in myth.  I am seeing about 50% failure and haven't  
> detected any sort of pattern, although perhaps I will write up a  
> little script and let it go a few hundred trials just to check on that.
>
> Once livetv starts working, it is true that you are "all set" in the  
> sense that you can (it seems) continue to watch live tv indefinitely,  
> change channels, etc without any problem.  However, if you want to  
> record it is still 50% odds that it works.  Even if you are watching  
> livetv and push the 'r'ecord button, it seems that it resets the  
> connection when switching to record mode and there's a good chance it  
> won't work.
>
> I suppose another option for a workaround would be to just keep the  
> transport stream open once it is working (just like live tv does when  
> changing channels).  We could look for a way to hand off the open  
> firewire stream to the recording process rather than having it  
> reinitialized every time.
>
> But that would still require human intervention to get things going  
> in the first place.  I'm going to try to hack up a way for the  
> firewire code to detect when the transport stream connection isn't  
> working and give a few tries at reinitializing it before giving up.
> It looks like libs/libmythtv/firewirerecorder.cpp is the place to do  
> this, so that's where I'm headed.
>
> I just noticed that there is a bug tracking system, but didn't see a  
> bug for this yet.  Should we add one so we'll have a place to submit  
> the patch?  It'll be good to have others who have this problem to  
> test and make sure it solves it for more than just me.

FYI.  The bug tracking is for Myth specific bugs.  The problem you have 
seems very much related to your hardware (in that you can exhibit the 
same problem using other tools) so I would not recommend submitting a 
bug report since it is likely to be closed as invalid.

Kevin


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