[mythtv-users] MythTV hangs entire system while watching (was MythTv crashes while watching or commercial flagging content recorded from Hauppauge HD PVR)

[Greg Zornetzer]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 8:26 AM, Brian Edmonds <brian at gweep.ca> wrote:

> I've been experiencing this crash with an audio loop for months now, and
> put it down to a flaky system. Up until yesterday...
>
> All but one of the crashes have been on a homebuilt 3Gz Core Duo box with
> onboard Intel video running 0.21 on Debian unstable (and previously Lenny,
> with the same crashes) connecting to the TV with an AVI to HDMI cable. But
> yesterday, after getting tired of the crashes (and the cooling problems, and
> the noise) I built a new system running 0.22 (built from source, as always)
> on an Acer AR1600 Atom+Ion box with the current Ubuntu Lucid beta, currently
> connecting to the TV with plain VGA, as I don't have an HDMI to HDMI cable
> yet. And lo and behold, it crashed in just the same way last night while
> watching SVU. (I know VDPAU is working since CPU use is negligible.) Apart
> from sharing a wireless keyboard (USB), a Streamzap remote, and displaying
> on a Samsung LCD, these systems could not be physically much more different,
> which leads me to suspect myth.
>
> (Oh, and they do share the same backend, an Intel quad core running Debian
> Lenny, which has been serving since at least the 0.18 days, and has been
> using a pair of Pinnacle USB capture devices since we switched to US
> broadcast OTA. The frontends were both connected to the same wall port which
> routes to a Netgear gigabit switch in the machine closet that the backend
> connects to directly. We also watch lots from our laptops (Lenovo X41
> tablets running Ubuntu, one Gutsy and one Hardy), and have never experienced
> one of these crashes there.)
>
> One interesting tidbit about the crashes, is that on both systems the
> computer has required a second cold boot to work properly. On the prior
> machine, I would shut it down by holding down the power button until the
> power supply would turn off. Then when turning on again, it would not go
> anywhere, not even a BIOS splash screen. Another hard power off and on would
> be needed, then it would boot and run normally. On the new system it booted
> after the hard power off, but the video was stuck in an Ubuntu splash screen
> and X startup failed. I could ssh into the machine, but couldn't figure out
> a way to recover it. Not even a software reboot cleared the splash screen,
> but a shutdown and cold reboot brought it back normally.
>
> So, any ideas? Any more useful information I can supply? System logs have
> not previously provided any useful reports at the time of the crash, which
> I'd always previously put down to dodgy memory or system overheating. I've
> been poking through the recent mail archives, and this report was the only
> thing that jumped out at me, particularly the looping audio bit.
>
> Brian.
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
Hi Brian,
So, it sounds like the computer is not hard-locking, is that correct?  Does
the caps lock key still work?

There are some cases where mythfrontend has locked on me using 0.21.  In
those cases, I can open a terminal and kill the mythfrontend process.  Is
this possible for you?  If the frontend is just getting caught in a loop,
perhaps you can get useful debugging output from mythfrontend itself.
running 'mythfrontend -v playback' and capturing the output may prove useful
in debugging this.
Good luck,
-Greg
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20100412/eba9f7b4/attachment-0001.htm>