[mythtv-users] System 'locking' on Watch TV

[Graham Dunn]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 11:37:59AM -0400, Isaac Richards wrote:
> On Friday 25 April 2003 11:30 am, Kaushik Mallick wrote:
> > I am not sure if this is a coincidence or not, but
> > this thing started happening to me as well last night!
> > I am using a WinTV Go (Model 190) PCI card and I am
> > running MythTV-0.8 on RedHat 8.0. Watching TV locks up
> > the mythfrontend, I have to hit Ctrl-Alt-F4 to get to
> > the desktop somehow and kill the terminals where I
> > isssued mythfrontend from. Sometimes, its even worse
> > and only thing that helps is a hard boot.
> 
> If it just locks up the frontend, then something else is running on /dev/dsp 
> that's not letting it open it.

I'm seeing something similar on a debian unstable system (unstable
packages from http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu:8088/~mdz/debian).

There seems to be something strange about the /etc/init.d/mythtv
startup. The symtoms are:

The backend server will appear to start during system startup, with
the following logged in /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log

Starting up as the master server.
QSettings: error creating /.qt
QSettings::sync: filename is null/empty
Probed: /dev/video - Television
Probed: /dev/video - Composite1

If I start mythfrontend, then try to watch tv, the interface will
freeze for a second or two, then come back. If I click on watch tv
again, the interface will hang until I kill mythfrontend.

Now, if I kill the mythbackend, and run it in a terminal as root, then
start mythfrontend, watching TV works fine. There's no QSettings error
when started this way. This suggested a permissions problem to me, but
it looks like /dev/dsp is rw for group audio, of which the mythtv user
is a member.

(Version: 0.8-11 for all installed mythtv packages)

I'm at a loss for now.

Graham