[mythtv-users] unusual trouble with skip-ahead

[Jerome Yuzyk]

On Thursday, June 21, 2012 08:42:30 PM Per Hatlevik <jakeisawake at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 8:52 PM, Jerome Yuzyk <jerome at supernet.ab.ca> 
wrote:
> > My crusty old 0.21 FE/BE setup has been as close to "appliance" as any
> > machine/software I've made in 30 years. It's coming up on six years
> > old now and starting to exhbit some odd symptoms that feel like the
> > DB is at fault somehow. Maybe. I run the optimize/repair thing every
> > Sunday and it's never reported an error. I also run a full SmartDisk
> > scan on Sunday and it doesn't report errors. Here are 2 curious
> > symptoms:
> > 
> > I have been following the NBA finals on TSN (in Canada, they get the
> > feed from ESPN). I use the 30-second skip for commercials instead of
> > commflagging. For the last 4 games I've started watching about an
> > hour into the game, sometimes SkipAhead sends me to the end of the
> > recording no matter where I am in the recording. If I skip back and
> > skip ahead, same thing. I work around it by skipping back and setting
> > a bookmark, then exiting and reentering the recording.
> > 
> > Another odd thing is that occasionally for a recording pressing
> > SkipAhead freezes the video and chipmunks the audio. If I wait for it
> > to get to the end of the recording and return to the menu all is fine
> > again. Nothing but bookmarking (the OK button on my remote) works - I
> > can set and clear, but the only way to clear things up is to wait for
> > the recording to chipmunk its way to the end, or to kill mythfrontend
> > and restart watching from the bookmark.
> > 
> > I know the box is old, but it's been rock-solid, isn't overheating or
> > anything unusual, and still works fine except for these two things
> > that started happening within the last couple months. Anything other
> > than "old age" that I could look at?
> 
> i'm not really sure what's happening but it might be useful to provide
> a little more info: does this behavior only happen on an in-progress
> recording? when the recording finishes are you able to watch and skip
> normally? what else is the BE doing when you see this behavior? are
> there multiple recordings happening and do you see this behavior on
> every recording?
> 
> might also be useful to state whether this is a combined be/fe or if
> you see this behavior on a remote fe.

From my original message: 

  - yes on in-progress recordings
  - the BE isn't doing much usually, sometimes commflagging
  - yes I'm running a FE/BE


A little extra info: The chipmunk audio happens for both SkipAhead and 
SkipCommercial, so it seems any attempt to look forward in the seektable 
causes problems.

To anticipate some other questions: 

The machine has 1G of memory, over half of which is usually marked as free 
by GKrellM.

I have lots of free disk space.

This behaviour has only started in the last six months, intermittently and 
with no prior misbehavior - it just happens.