[mythtv-users] Freeze!

[Brian Wood]

On Jan 21, 2006, at 5:00 PM, John Biundo wrote:

> Desperately looking for debugging tips!  How would you go about  
> tracking
> down this problem (see attached)?
>
>
> The problem in a nutshell: if I pause livetv for a while, then rewind,
> the frontend freezes.  Sometimes it comes back, sometimes not.  So  
> far,
> very few clues in the log files (see below).
>
>
> I haven't had much luck (OK, zero responses, but I'm not  
> complaining ;-)
> to my earlier queries about my frontend freeze problem.  Googling
> around, trawling through Trac, etc., have been largely fruitless.
>
> Rather than search for an answer or a direct match to my problem, I'm
> hoping I can get some clues so I can try to root around and work out a
> solution.
>
> If someone could please enlighten me, just a little bit, on the
> following question, I'd be very grateful!
>
> Is there a general description of what these mythfrontend messages  
> mean,
> and what might be some possible underlying causes?
>
> 2005-11-27 22:18:08.732 Waited too long for decoder to pause
> 2005-11-27 22:18:09.184 Waited too long for video out to pause
>
> For what it's worth, there are usually a bunch of the "...video out to
> pause" messages for each "decoder to pause" message.  It usually
> happens, for me, after livetv has been paused for a while.  And  
> perhaps,
> after the pause, attempting to rewind.
>
> Sometimes the frontend comes back to life after a very long freeze.
> Sometimes the whole thing degenerates into a bunch of mpeg decode  
> errors.
>
> Anyway, hoping to get some clues that might help guide my
> experimentation (e.g., trying a different filesystem, a different
> kernel, a different version of mythtv, a particular debugging flag and
> experiment, etc.)

What card are you using for capture? Is it a "raw framegrabber" or a  
card with built-in MPEG encoding (PVR-250, 350 etc.).

What format are you using to capture live TV (hardware mpeg-2, MPEG 4  
or whatever) and what are your parameters for recording "live  
TV" (resolution, bitrate etc.)

What hardware (CPU) are you using, if you're using software encoding  
this could be important as it loads the CPU a lot.

Is the machine doing anything else while running MythTV? What is your  
CPU load when running Myth?

Looks like something may be getting taxed past its ability. I'm not  
saying I can figure it out but the above information will make it  
more likely that somebody can :-)