[mythtv-users] Any way to tell which tuner card might be bad?

[Dan Wilga]

On 2/10/10 5:35 PM, James Pifer wrote:
> So it would be best to have a separate hard drive just for your
> recordings, correct? If I had a smaller hard drive for the OS/mysql and
> a large dedicated drive for video/recording storage, theoretically that
> would/could fix the IOBOUND issue?

Yes.

Another thing you could try if you have enough free RAM is to 
temporarily use a RAM disk (like tmpfs) for the database. If the problem 
goes away, then a second drive will very likely help. (I don't recommend 
keeping the database this way unless you're willing to deal with the 
consequences of a power failure.)

> Of course it's not 100% that this is what is causing the issues on the
> recordings, but it very well could be and IOBOUND errors are not good
> either way...

It's pretty close to 100%. IOBOUND effectively means that portions of 
the video stream are being dropped rather than saved to disk. That's why 
you see MPEG "garbage" or outright skips.
-- 
Dan Wilga                                                        "Ook."