[mythtv-users] Begging for help with live TV freeze

[Alan Snyder]

> 
> 
> Curtis Wood wrote:
> > > > Alan Snyder wrote:
> > > > > A number of people, myself included, have
reported frontend 
> > > > > freezes in live TV, the symptom being
> > > > frozen picture and sound, the frontend
spitting out "Waited 2 
> > > > seconds for data to become available, waiting
> > > > > again...", and the backend seemingly working
normally.
> > > > >  
> >   Ive been playing around with MythTV, finally
have it reliably
> > runningon my cable system. At first I was having a
few of these 
> > lock ups my self, I resolved the lock ups by
finetuning the 
> > channels. Essentially it looks as though MythTV
does not like 
> > weak signals. 
> snip
> 
> I've know I had a weak signal (using a four-way
non-amplified 
> splitter) so this is definitely something worth
looking into for
> me.  I've thought about getting an amplified
splitter, but didn't
> know if it was worth the $50 since the picture looks
great on my
> PVR-250 and pretty good on my bttv card.  The signal
on the TV and
> vcr from the same splitter look terrible, however. 
I'm very
> impressed with the quality of the tuner in the
capture cards, but
> I'll give the amplified splitter at radioshack
mentioned recently
> in another post a try.
> 

If a weak signal is the problem, then it would most
likely
relate to CPU utilization, noise being so hard to
compress,
which *should* just result in prebuffering pauses and
stutters,
not a complete freeze. It should be possible to evoke
such a
problem by hammering on the CPU with another nice'd
process.
It shouldn't happen with a PVR-250, though.  If this
is the root
cause, there's a bug somewhere in how one end or the
other
deals with delays in re-filling the buffer.

I have another question though: Is everyone who's
having this
problem running Mandrake 9.1?


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