[mythtv-users] My experience with MythTV annoyances, 0.20.1 version

[Yeechang Lee]

Now that an official 0.20.1 release is out, it's time to reexamine the
list of minor remaining annoyances I previously discussed in June
(<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/208552#208552>)
and October
(<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/233570#233570>)
2006.

Since October 2006, my setup has changed in the following ways:

* Old: 2TB of MythTV-dedicated storage on an EXT3-based RAID 0
  NAS. New: Several times more storage on two JFS RAID 5/6 arrays.
* New: A new quad-core slave backend/RAID 6 array (see above) has
  joined the existing frontend/master backend.
* Old: Analog output to a 2.1 speaker system. New: SP/DIF output to a
  new 5.1 speaker system and receiver.
* Old: 32-bit Fedora Core 4 on the frontend/backend. New: 64-bit
  Fedora Core 6
  (<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/238963#238963>.

Current remaining annoyances:

* The move to 5.1 digital audio revealed a problem with the audio in
  about half of the recordings I make from analog (sub-100) cable
  channels
  (<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/241814#241814>).
  Before Mike Dean jumps in, let me stress again that this has nothing
  to do with ALSA configuration files (and if he or anyone else can
  prove me wrong, I'd very much welcome it) or lack thereof.
* Some remaining occasional stability issues that result in
  mythbackend dying (perhaps once every two or three weeks) with the
  chalk marks of the corpse visible in dmesg. While much, much, much
  improved from 0.19 or the early days of 0.20, the occasional death
  still occurs. I strongly suspect that there are a few remaining
  obscure bugs in mythbackend, ffmpeg (see
  <URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/263934#263934>),
  and/or libmpeg2 serious enough to kill mythbackend when generating
  preview bitmaps. As Mike Dean notes
  (<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/269323#269323>,
  there's actually no way to stop the bitmaps from being
  created. Perhaps
  0.20.1 marks the final elimination of such bugs killing mythbackend,
  but I'd rather not find out the hard way and would prefer to be able
  to shut down preview-bitmap generation entirely.

  Another semi-reliable source of mythbackend deaths back in the day
  was pulling up the MythTV HTML status page, either through MythWeb
  or (especially) http://mythtv:6544/. These crashes have also very,
  very drastically diminished in intensity but I'm not quite ready to
  declare them as extinct as smallpox yet.
* The mystery write-hang issue I detail at
  <URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/242065#242065>.
  As far as I can tell, I have solved the issue--which is not related
  to MythTV, but has something to do with frequent/lengthy writes to
  the boot partition--by moving /var/lib/mysql (and /var/log/mythtv,
  although this was almost-certainly unnecessary) to another disk (I
  had it on one of the MythTV-dedicated RAID arrays for a while) or to
  another partition on the boot drive (as I currently do so); see
  <URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/267763#267763>.
* I still very occasionally (once a week, perhaps) see mythfrontend
  dying, typically when I jump to Recorded Programs or do something
  else from within one of the setup screens. Since when mythfrontend
  dies on my frontend the mythtv user automatically logs itself out
  and back in, restarting mythfrotend along the way, it's never been a
  big deal.

. . . And that's it. Really. 99 and 44/100ths of the time my MythTV
setup is rock solid and easy to install and fiddle with.

I'll bet I'm not alone in having put off trying MythTV out because of
all the horror stories about just how hard it was to get up and
running. I've never found it so all the way back to my first day back
in December 2005 when I sat back and pulled up a high-definition
recording I captured via FireWire. I remain convinced that 95% of the
problems people ask about here are because they do not take sufficient
advantage of the mountain of resources available to answer their
questions. As always, my thanks to the entire MythTV community for a
truly world-class project.

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US