[mythtv] Watching While Recording Instability

[Mike Wohlgemuth]

Well, it took me longer to do some more troubleshooting on this problem 
than I thought.  I thought one of the CVS updates fixed the problems, 
but I noticed the problems were still there yesterday.  I am seeing 2 
problems, both with watching while recording:

1.  If 2 shows are scheduled to record back to back, and I'm watching at 
the end of the first show, the frontend exits to the mythtv tv menu and 
the second show never starts recording.  I don't see anything in the 
backend logs, but the backend seems hung and I have to kill it and 
restart it before it will start recording.

2.  I have the right arrow set to jump ahead 30 seconds and the left 
arrow set to jump back 5.  If I fast forward while watching while 
recording (sometimes it takes a few keystrokes, and maybe hitting the 
left and right arrow keys a few times), the image will freeze on the 
screen.  Sometimes it will continue on after the freeze, and sometimes 
it will think that it has reached the end of the recording and prompt me 
about whether I want to save or delete the program.  If I save it, I can 
go back and watch it and reproduce the behavior.  If I do it long 
enough, eventually mythtv stops responding to keyboard input.  It might 
have the picture frozen, but in my testing this morning, the recording 
was playing fine.  When this happens, it appears that multiple frontend 
processes are running (or maybe threads).  Here is the output of ps 
-efwww | grep myth:

myth      1212  1201  0 Apr15 ?        00:00:00 /bin/bash 
/usr/local/bin/startmyth
myth      1257  1212  0 Apr15 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent 
/usr/share/apps/switchdesk/Xclients.mythtv
myth      1260  1212  0 Apr15 ?        00:00:00 fvwm
myth      1261  1212  0 Apr15 ?        00:00:00 irxevent
myth      4918  4917  0 08:05 pts/2    00:00:00 -bash
myth      4959     1 41 08:06 ?        00:05:56 mythbackend -d -l 
/home/myth/mythbackend.log
myth      4974  1212  3 08:06 ?        00:00:30 [mythfrontend]
myth      4977  4974  0 08:06 ?        00:00:00 [mythfrontend <defunct>]
root      5009  2194  0 08:09 pts/0    00:00:00 tail -f 
/home/myth/mythbackend.log
myth      5060     1  8 08:15 ?        00:00:23 [mythfrontend]
myth      5061     1  0 08:15 ?        00:00:00 [mythfrontend]
myth      5062     1  3 08:15 ?        00:00:08 [mythfrontend]
myth      5083  4918  0 08:20 pts/2    00:00:00 ps -efwww

I have a script that automatically respawns mythfrontend if it dies 
(process 1212 in the above output), but it doesn't appear to be the 
culprit here.  If I kill all the mythfrontend processes, I can go back 
and start over, and the backend process doesn't seem to be affected by 
any of it.  If I never hit any key to skip forward or back, I can watch 
the entire recording without any problems.

I'm running RedHat 8.0, but I'm not sure if that make any difference.

Mike