[mythtv-users] Wireless FE Stumbles and locks up -- fix?

Craig Huff huffcslists at gmail.com
Wed Sep 15 00:33:59 UTC 2010


I have a remote frontend in the bedroom to which it would be
inconvenient (low WAF) to run ethernet cable, so I set it up with
802.11g wifi.  This should be good enough since the output is SD via
TV-Out to a (slightly) old TV set.

However...  It is every so often stumbling during video playback and
has a bad habit of locking up.  As we speak, I am ssh'd in and watch
top report a load average just under 1.0 mythfrontend.re commanding
the most cpu time at about 28%, 220K ram free.  This is a new Athlon
II x2 based microATX system with 1G ram installed.  Monitoring
/var/log/mythwelcome.log shows it periodically reporting "NVP(1):
prebuffering pause", which I suspect is an indication that wifi
bandwidth is coming up short.  I've also seen
"RingBuf(myth://192.168.53.149:6543/1046_20100914190215.mpg): Waited
1.0 seconds for data to become available..." once (so far tonight) and
"Checking to see if there's a new livetv program to switch to..".  I
just checked and it is still playing the live tv show I picked at
random for testing.

FWIW, the wifi setup is a Netgear N300 802.11n V2.0 router about 20
feet away from the frontend, on the same floor, and the frontend has a
D-Link WDA-2320 802.11g PCI adapter installed.

Short of waiting for it to crash again and doing a post-mortem on all
the log files in /var/log and /var/log/mythtv, does anyone have advice
on how to pin down the problem and/or what to do about it, including
proving it is the ethernet bandwidth that is the problem which would
be necessary to sell the need to string CAT-5 cable?

TIA,

Craig.


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list