[mythtv-users] Mythbackend recording glitches

[Allen Edwards]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 1:09 AM Stephen Worthington <
stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

>
> >Thank you Greg, Stephen, and everyone else who has helped me.
> >
> >This has been an education and your help is very much appreciated.  Where
> I
> >am right now is that we just watched a show that previous to my attempt at
> >fixing the Mythbuntu 8 setup was unwatchable. It would crash every 10
> >minutes.  We watched it without glitches or tearing on the old Mythbuntu 8
> >system.
> >
> >There were several reasons I did the upgrade to Mythbuntu 16.  One is that
> >the Mythbuntu 8 system was crashing and I thought somehow that whatever
> >caused the one drive to prevent booting had damaged the main drive as I
> was
> >seeing problems with both.  At first I had suspected the disk controller
> >and that may yet be the case. Hopefully that is not the case as I will
> need
> >three drives to do the cloning.  The other was that I wanted to see some
> >improvement in video quality, commercial detection, and any other
> >performance improvements ten years would have produced.  But to tell the
> >truth, I saw none of that even though I put in a higher power video card
> >and did get everything working, except for the occasional glitching.
> >
> >But the effort was not completely wasted because it was only though
> >familiarizing myself again with the system that I was able to figure out
> >how to stabilize the old system.  In hindsight, I should have troubleshoot
> >the old system but I had all the reasons listed above to upgrade.  At
> first
> >I thought I would need all new hardware but just thought I would give the
> >old hardware a try and we all know that story. Just over that next hill.
> >
> >If I do find the need to continue with the upgrade at least we have
> learned
> >some things. We know for sure that the glitching is not caused by coax,
> >antenna, connectors, tuners, ethernet,etc. It may be swap or it might be
> >some cron job I don't know about.  If I were to continue on the path of
> >getting -16 working I would purchase THIS
> ><
> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002N52ZO4/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A26PVB3960EU85&psc=1
> >
> >memory. It is slower than the memory I have now but there is more of it
> and
> >if I can add it to what I have, I would have 6GB, otherwise 4GB. But at
> >this point I see no benefit for doing so. Perhaps this is because I am
> >recording 720P video and watching it on a 720P display so I am not asking
> >as much from the system. I don't know but it works just fine and I am
> tired
> >of chasing one problem after another only to still not have a system as
> >good as what I had ten years ago.  If that doesn't work, I would try again
> >to specify all new hardware and start with a modern system.  But even that
> >is not painless as I have been unable to find a case that works in my
> setup.
> >
> >At this point my plan is to clone with Clonezilla and if that doesn't
> work,
> >I will try gparted, which is not on my old system so I would need three
> >drives hooked up anyway.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >
> >Allen
>
> The problems with video support are worst when dealing with
> deinterlacing, so if your video is all 720p, that explains why it just
> works.  You may also find that 1080p would just work if you had your
> video settings set to 1920x1080.  Most people have to deal with 1080i
> though - right around the world, 1080i is what TV is broadcast in when
> they want to call it "HD", since 1080p was unable to be broadcast
> using the original DVB-T, DVB-S and ATSC standards.  It is only when
> DVB-T2 and DVB-S2 became available that 1080p broadcasting started,
> and there are lots of older TVs that do not support DVB-T2 or DVB-S2
> so they are usually only available where the broadcasters pay for a
> separate frequency to broadcast 1080p on in parallel to the same
> channels in 1080i or 720p.
>
> It is easy to add an extra drive to a system temporarily.  Just leave
> the covers off and sit the drive within reach of a power supply
> connector - sitting on the case or next to it.  Add a SATA cable and
> it will run happily like that.  If you can not get a power supply
> cable to it then you might need an extension cable to do that and that
> is when it gets difficult.  I have molex Y cables I can use to get an
> extra molex connector and then molex to SATA power cables.  So I can
> put a drive anywhere within about 30 cm without problems.  But a case
> that only has two drives in it already should have one more SATA power
> cable on the power supply that can be used for a third drive without
> having any extra cables or needing to install it inside the case.
>
> Have you tried installing gparted on your Mythbutu 8 system?  I am
> fairly sure it was available in Ubuntu 9 back when I was using that,
> so it may well be available for Ubuntu 8.  But you do have to install
> the package.
> ______________
>

Barring unforeseen problems, I am done.

I have MythTV back again and no glitches, audio on Digital and Audio at the
same time, basically everything is good.
This is Mythbuntu 8 on a new 1T WD Blue drive. I read all the discussions
about which drive to get and my old drive was a blue drive and it failed.
But it lasted 10 years and it really seems like all these drives are
probably the same but the red is just run slower which gives it longer
life.  If it fails, I will get a Red and clone the old drive like I use did
using Clonezilla.

A word about the cloning.  I went from a 500G drive to a 1T drive.  I used
a iso image on a DVD and booted off that with the two drives attached to
the computer.  I checked Expert in the menu and checked option K1 which
expended the partitions so that I am left with 916G on the root partition.
I took about 2 hours. I have the old 500G installed as a backup so I won't
lose my system in the event of a disk failure.  We don't save recordings
past watching them so in the even to a disk failure, we would just end up
watching some shows streaming.

It was both interesting and frustrating trying to "upgrade" my old
hardware. Perhaps if I bought some more memory it would have worked but it
was just one more thing too many once I figured out how to stabilize the
Mythbuntu 8 system.

I installed the Mythbuntu 16 disk in the computer but of course it isn't
usable without the 750 video card.  I had hoped to have it dual boot so my
wife could watch the shows she taped in the last couple of weeks.  Maybe
Mythbuntu 8 can run the 750 card and now that I have an image of the system
perhaps it is worth trying.  Any opinions out there?  If it can, maybe I
will buy the additional memory and see if the new system can be made to
work if for no other reason than to share the experience.

Thanks to all who helped me through this journey.  I truly appreciate it.

I will leave with some words of wisdom:  "Never upgrade unless your system
is broken"

Allen
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