[mythtv-users] Playing a Video freezes the GUI

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Mon May 5 20:11:31 EDT 2003


At 06:14 PM 5/5/2003 -0700, Joshua Bernstein wrote:
>So after adding that line, it still doesn't work... Something is weird... 
>If I run Myth as root it works GREAT! but if I'm running it as my 
>"mediauser" it freezes...
>
>Its got to be a permissions problem to the X display, no?

No (or at least I do not think so). But first an aside ...

Because of the way the Myth GUI hides X, there is no trivial way to look at 
STDERR to get a better sense of what is going on. There are perhaps better 
workarounds, but this one worked for me. I used Myth's configuration screen 
to make the Myth GUI smaller than screen size (600 x440 on a 640x480 
display). This gave me access to the X WM's (blackbox) control bar at the 
bottom of the screen, which I could then use to switch to the xterms I'd 
used to start mythfrontend and mythbackend. THis let me see what STDERR 
output each was generating

Now, a guess about your problem -- it is a permissions problem but not with 
X. Instead, ordinary-user you does not have access to some device (e.g., 
/dev/dsp) that mplayer needs to work. It (mplayer) tries to tell you this 
but you can't see the error output so are stuck with killing X itself (the 
only thing you can do, given your restricted access to the X WM).

This part is just a guess. The real advice is that you need to devise a way 
to see STDERR to figure out what is really up. Perhaps others can suggest 
better workarounds than this fairly clumsy and ugly one I've contrived.





More information about the mythtv-users mailing list