[mythtv-users] Myth 0.14 - Version 1.0??

J. Donavan Stanley jdonavan at jdonavan.net
Sun Feb 8 13:40:22 EST 2004


My comments inline...

malcolm-mythtv wrote:

>On Sunday 08 February 2004 10:10 am, Brent Borghese wrote:
>  
>
>>I have been using Myth now for over a year and I have to say Myth 0.14
>>is the best yet!!!!!!
>>
>>Does any body else feel that its time to call it Version 1.0 or maybe
>>2.0?
>>    
>>
>
>No.  Don't know about the rest of you guys but MythTV seems very unstable.  I 
>have to reboot at least once a day sometimes several times a day.  If I hit 
>"M" when viewing live TV and navigate the menu it almost guarentees a crash.
>  
>
This sounds like a PVR350 issue.

>When watching TV for a while and you hit "right arrow key" instead of skipping 
>forward it skips back.  Subsequent presses of right arrow key will then start 
>to skip forward.  Sometimes however it just craps out and the OSD displays 
>that you are about 5 seconds behind real time but Disk Usage is 101.xx %.  At 
>this point it will not allow you to Pause TV, skip forward or backwards.
>  
>
Fixed in CVS.


>I've also found playing around with "I" and Pause TV, "fast forward" and so 
>forth to much causes my TV output to just freeze solid.  Like the mythbox 
>just locked up or something.  Only it didn't lockup.  CPU is idle too, I'm 
>not sure what it's waiting on but all of a sudden 20 seconds later or so the 
>TV starts working again.  Usually at this point it's pretty unstable.  
>Skipping forward or trying a commercial skip after a so called "freeze" 
>usually results in the box locking for real.
>  
>
I've seen this but can't reproduce it reliably.  Things normally come 
back to normal in a few seconds if you skip forward some more.

>I can't play back a DVD to the TV without it been super slow and jumpy.  I 
>know this is not MythTV's fault but rather something to do with Xine / ivtv 
>driver and using the PVR-350 out.  Anyhow my point is I can't watch DVDs yet
>
Again a PVR350 issue.  Lost (most?) folks don't use a PVR350 with it's 
TV out (for the exact reason you mentioned).

>You can't edit out commercials like you're supposed to.  From reading the 
>mailing lists it looks like some people have it working.  Others I've seen 
>have the same issues as me.  It's buggy and doesn't deal with mark points 
>quite right and you can't transcode mpeg2 to mpeg2 yet so even if I do manage 
>to get a movie all marked out I can't transcode the recordings made by my PVR 
>cards to save disk space.
>  
>
Commercial / cutpoint flagging has always worked for me.  There WAS a 
point recently where automaticly skipping over commercials didn't work 
if you'd added a cutpoint by hand while viewing the recording but that's 
been fixed in CVS as well.

True, you can't transcode MPEG2 to MPEG2.  But I believe nuvexport 
solves that problem for you.  Personally, I'd transcode to MPEG4 and put 
3 or 4 movies on one disk instead of one per DVD.

>Picture in Picture does not work right.  If I hit V I get nothing.  If I play 
>around and hit combinations of V, B, N eventually I see something but it's 
>real slow and I can see lags in picture and sound as it's trying to display.  
>Once it's up hitting "B" to change focus doesn't show you which has focus?  
>The big picture or the little one.  Only way to tell is to try and change 
>channels.  Unfortunatly that's real slow and if the wrong one had focus you 
>have to wait for it to change, then change it back, and then change focus 
>again and try changing channels again.
>  
>
I'd be willing to bet this is a PVR350 issue as well.

>It's 6:00pm and you're watching a movie on channel 6 on capture card 1 about 
>30 minutes behind real time.  You have a recording scheduled at 6:30pm on  
>channel 8.  At 6:30pm it automatically just changes the channel on capture 
>card 1 to channel 8 and starts recording it.  It should have grabbed your 
>idle capture card 2 sitting there doing nothing.  You hit Esc and exit to the 
>main menu, select TV and it now grabs capture card 2.  You go to channel 6 
>only to see your movie is over.  The ringbuffer is gone and you just lost the 
>last 30 minutes of your movie.
>  
>
The scheduler definitely needs to take live TV into account.


>I think Myth has some great potential and I'll continue to upgrade as things 
>become available.  Maybe one day it will be stable enough to put on my main 
>TV.
>  
>
It's on my main TV.  But then again 1) I don't use a PVR350 and 2) I 
built a system from scratch specificly for MythTV using components I 
knew would work and work well with Linux in general and Myth specificly.

>I may not be able to code and fix myth but I sure can test it and let you guys 
>know what's going on.
>  
>
Then by all means TEST things.   When something goes wrong, try to 
remember what is was you did that lead up to the problem.  Go back over 
those steps and see if you can reproduce the same effect.  If it crashes 
get a backtrace.

When you post about a bug give details.  Post both the frontend and 
backend logs from that time period.  Give the steps needed to reproduce 
it.  Be DETAILED.

>I have 3 hard drives I've been switching between.  Gentoo, KnoppMyth, and 
>Mandrake.  The main one I've had the most success with is my Mandrake drive 
>and compiling everything I need from source so here's it's details.
>  
>
Have your tried FC1?  It's been very stable with Myth for me.  So much 
so I dumped my Vector/Slackware installs.


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