[mythtv-users] Samba, MythTV, and problems seeking and jumping

Micah Zebulon Wedemeyer fanmail at micah-wedemeyer.net
Sat Oct 21 20:11:45 UTC 2006


Ok,

This has been a long and arduous road, but I think I finally have found 
some answers.  But first, some history:

For a while now, I have been having trouble with recordings running 
longer than 30 minutes.  At about the 40 minute mark, I would lose the 
ability to skip around.  I would hit the jump key or the skip key, and 
the display would get corrupted (very artifacty) then it would continue, 
but no skip.  So, I got used to it and it became part of TV watching.

Lately, I got sick of it and have been trying to figure it out.  I 
thought the problem was with the IVTV drivers because I could display it 
outside of MythTV.  I would record something (using cat /dev/video0), 
let it run for an hour, then try to play it back with MPlayer.  Mplayer 
always played the files, but gave the following error output whenever I 
tried to seek: "Cannot seek in linear streams"  So, I assumed there was 
a recording issue.

Recently, on a whim, I copied a recorded file to the local drive on my 
frontend.  All this time I had been streaming them over the network 
(100Mb Ethernet) via a Samba share.  After copying the file locally, 
then using MPlayer on the local file, it no longer complained about the 
"cannot seek in linear streams".  So, following this lead, I shut off 
Samba on the server.  All of a sudden, MythTV could seek in the 
recordings without a problem.

Now, the weird part: Samba should have nothing to do with the recording 
and therefore Myth.  I have Samba set up to share the mount point where 
the backend is storing the recordings, but it is not mounted as an SMB 
share on the backend.  It's mounted as an LVM, since the drives are 
physically located in the backend chassis.  So, it puzzles me that Samba 
would cause any problems for Myth playback.  Myth uses its own scheme to 
stream files to the frontends, correct?  The MPlayer issues make sense, 
but not the Myth issues.

So, for now, I have just shut off Samba.  It's not 100% necessary for 
me, but I'd like to have it running anyway since it's convenient.  Does 
anyone have any suggestions?  Also, is this worth noting on the wiki?

Versions:
Fedora Core 4 2.6.17-???
MythTV 0.20
Samba ?? (3.0 I think)

Here is some text to get this tagged by searching.  God knows it took me 
long enough to find the root cause, maybe someone else is having similar 
problems:
SMB
Samba
cannot seek in linear streams
corrupted playback
corrupted recordings
cannot seek
cannot jump
rewind
fast-forward


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