[mythtv-users] one single channel stops working (DVB-C, both LiveTV and recordings)

[Joachim]

Hello,

crawling online resources I couldn't find a solution for my problem, not 
even anyone else experiencing the same issues. Hopefully someone of you 
can help me:

I had a perfectly working mythTV DVB-C (Germany) installation until end 
of february. Out of a sudden, without me chaning anything, one single 
channel (ZDF) stopped working. It doesn't work in LiveTV mode any more, 
nor do any recordings I made on this channel. 2-week-old recordings from 
this channel which I kept, however, are still working.

I figured out that, when recording something on this channel, recording 
works fine in the sense that the video data is recorded. The 
corresponding .mpg file stored on disk seems to be ok and plays 
perfectly when I manually play it with mplayer (also, it doesn't produce 
any errors, warnings or other unusual output when playing it with 
mplayer). BUT: mythTV can't play this recording! The preview icons both 
in mythfrontend and mythweb are just black (when they're created while 
displaying them the first time, the mythbackend process does something 
which causes load for several minutes but doesn't result in any debug 
output or a thumbnail icon). When trying to play the recording I just 
get a black screen and mythfrontend keeps printing "NVP: Prebuffer wait 
timed out 10 times." -- just repeatedly this line, nothing more compared 
to the usual output. (When deinterlacing is disabled, mythfrontend stays 
reactive and playback can be cancelled using ESC; when deinterlacing is 
enabled however, I've to kill mythfrontend.)

I just can't get the clue what's going on here. Old recordings from this 
channel reproducibly play and new ones don't. All other channels still 
work. I verified that the VID and service ID of that channel did not 
change. I also contacted the TV network and asked if they changed 
anything in the stream format or the stream headers. But they say that 
they didn't change anything lately.

BTW: I'm running mythTV 0.21.0+fixes16838-0ubuntu3.1 on Ubuntu 8.04.

Kind regards,
     Joachim