[mythtv-users] Playback hung

[Dick Steffens]

While watching a recorded program it hung. There was no response to the 
remote, no response to the keyboard, and no response to the mouse (which 
I can see at the top edge of the screen while the front end is running). 
The only solution was to power cycle the machine. While Ubuntu 12.04 
with Gnome was booting there was a message about /tmp not being present. 
Once the boot process was finished I opened up a nautilus window and 
navigated to /. tmp was there, and it had a number of files and 
directories inside it.

I closed nautilus and started up the front end. It took a relatively 
long time to start up. It took so long that I wasn't sure I had actually 
started it and clicked on the icon I put on the top bar of the gnome 
desktop a second time. But after a minute or so it came up. Actually, I 
should say they came up. At first the playback was normal. But after I 
skipped forward a number of times there was a second audio track 
running. I couldn't figure it out until I exited the front end 
completely only to hear the second audio track still running.

Because of my overscan issue the top and bottom bars of the gnome 
desktop are only slightly visible. I did finally notice that there was 
an instance of the front end showing up at the bottom of the screen. 
Clicking on it restored it and I was back to normal.

So, is there ever a reason why one would want it to be possible for 
there to be more than one instance of the front end running at the same 
time? If not, is there a way to prevent multiple instances? I know some 
programs do this -- Firefox and Thunderbird come to mind -- but I have 
no idea how much is involved in making them work that way.

Anyway, my original issue was related to playback freezing. Is there 
some other way I could have recovered from that other than power cycling 
the machine?

I suppose I could have tried logging in from another machine. That 
didn't occur to me at the time.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens