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

[Nick Rout]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Joachim <joge at upb.de> wrote:
> 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.

I suspect you have an error in your database and should run the repair
script as mentioned here:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User_Manual:Periodic_Maintenance#Optimize_the_Database