[mythtv-users] Help needed - jittery playback, missing recordings, 16 second recordings, all kinds of craziness

[Michael T. Dean]

On 05/03/2006 10:41 PM, T. Waldren wrote:

> About a month ago I upgraded to .19 from .18 (where everything was 
> working gloriously) and I keep having problems.  I have been trying to 
> read through all the mailings, and searching the archives to see if I 
> can find answers for all my problems, but so far nothing seems to help.
>
> The symptoms:
>
> 1)When you select a recording from recording shows, you get 4-5 secs 
> of blank screen (no sound) then the recording starts, but is very 
> jittery at the beginning and sometimes at random spots in the recording.
>
> 2)Some recordings, for which mythtv says there is a file never play.  
> I get 5 to 10 secs of blank screen, then go back to the menu.  I can 
> go out and see that the files actually exist, but mythtv can never 
> play them from the frontend.
>
> 3)Mythtv just doesn't record a show.  Its listed to be recorded, the 
> system is running when it should be recorded, but nothing shows up in 
> the recorded listings.  I have not sat there to see if the system 
> shows that a turner is currently recording at the time.
>
> 4) The frontend crashes, a lot.  Sometimes, if you hit pause, play, 
> anything on the remote during the above mentioned blank screens, the 
> front end goes away, and the log shows a segmentation fault as the 
> last thing listed.
>
> 5) There are shows that mythtv says are recorded, that do not have 
> files present for them.
>
> 6) Lastly, it records 16 secs of a show (when you play it, that is how 
> long it says the show is) but the data on the file from the recordings 
> screen says that the full length was recorded.
>
> 7) Last Lastly (the wife just added this as she read over my shoulder) 
> sometimes mythtv records a show, without sound.  This happened 
> occasionally with .18, but is more frequent with .19
>
> I am not sure what people would want to know in order to help out. 
>
> I am running fc3, mythtv .19


And I would guess it's really MythTV 0.19--and not MythTV 0.19-fixes.  
Many of these problems sound identical to ones fixed in the -fixes 
branch.  My recommendation is to go to 0.19-fixes (or convince your 
packager to do so :).

> , on an Amd Athlon 1800 (on a Chaintech 7nif2 board) with 512 meg of 
> ram.  I have 300 gig of harddrive space for recordings, and that is 
> around 65% full.
>
> Thanks for any help that anyone can give me. The wife is getting 
> really peeved that her shows are not being recorded, and has asked 
> repeatedly if I can downgrade back to the older version.


Well, the simple answer for her is, "No."  Once you go forward, you 
can't go back (at least not with your data intact unless you're willing 
to manually "downgrade" the data--which will likely take more time than 
fixing the issues).  :)

Mike