[mythtv-users] Possible race condition in mythvideo file scanner related to non-ascii characters

Ryan Patterson ryan.goat at gmail.com
Wed Jul 24 14:22:00 UTC 2013


I've experienced intermittent behavior of the mythvideo file scanner
skipping files & directories with non-ascii characters (ie. files such
as: 'pokémon s05e02.mkv')

The failure happens maybe one in thirty times I scan for new files in
mythvideo.  The skipped files will successfully get re-added in a
subsequent mythvideo scan, without any modification to the file system
and/or restarting or resetting of mythfrontend or mythbackend or the
physical hardware.  This (intermittent) behavior has remained
consistent across multiple distro versions (Debian Wheezy & Squeeze)
and multiple filesystems (ext4 & btrfs).

This behavior is similar to what is described in Ticket #7487:
MythVideo ignoring directories/files with non-ascii characters.  In
that ticket Robin Hill states the root cause of the issue is related
to which user is executing mythbackend and proper setting of LANG &
LC_ALL environment variables.

Either this is a different issue from Ticket #7487 or the root cause
Robin Hill listed in there is wrong.  My mythbackend is being executed
by user "mythttv" and that user's locale environment variables are
fully set.  Output from locale command follows. . .

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$

How can I get consistent behavior in the mythvideo file scanner?  Is
this a mythtv bug or user error?

When this behavior acts up mythvideo "forgets about" over 750 files.
When they are re-found on a subsequent scan, it takes several minuets
to fetch the metadata for all the "new" files.  And of coarse I am
needlessly hammering the metadata host re-fetching coverart, fanart,
etc for all these files every time this happens.

system details follow. . .
- separate backend & frontend systems, both running debian stable 64bit
- all mythvideo files are local to the backend system
- mythtv compiled by me from 0.26-fixes with no patches

$ mythbackend --version
Please attach all output as a file in bug reports.
MythTV Version : v0.26.0-216-g99eb39a
MythTV Branch : fixes/0.26
Network Protocol : 75
Library API : 0.26.20130225-1
QT Version : 4.8.2
Options compiled in:
 linux profile use_hidesyms using_alsa using_oss using_pulse
using_pulseoutput using_backend using_bindings_perl
using_bindings_python using_bindings_php using_dvb using_frontend
using_hdhomerun using_ceton using_hdpvr using_iptv using_ivtv
using_joystick_menu using_lirc using_mheg using_opengl_video
using_qtwebkit using_qtscript using_qtdbus using_v4l2 using_x11
using_xv using_bindings_perl using_bindings_python using_bindings_php
using_mythtranscode using_opengl using_ffmpeg_threads using_live
using_mheg using_libass
$

_____________
Ryan Patterson


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