[mythtv-users] Begging for help with live TV freeze
Patrick E. McKnight
pem at theriver.com
Mon Dec 8 23:19:53 EST 2003
Alan Snyder wrote:
> A number of people, myself included, have reported
> frontend freezes in live TV, the symptom being frozen
> picture and sound, the frontend spitting out "Waited 2
> seconds for data to become available, waiting
> again...", and the backend seemingly working normally.
>
>
> Previous reports, including some backtraces, are at
>
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/perl/mailarc/gforum.cgi?post=94005
> (includes backtraces from two users and some console
> output)
>
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/perl/mailarc/gforum.cgi?post=82957
>
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/perl/mailarc/gforum.cgi?post=81509
>
> This is very frustrating because I know that the best
> way to contribute is to track down the problem and fix
> it but I lack a sufficient understanding of what's
> going on. The problem is not a crash in that the
> frontend is running and just doesn't seem to get any
> data from the backend, but the backend seems to be
> fine and doesn't need to be restarted. It looks like
> the function spitting out the error is the one that
> pulls data from the ringbuffer, while another thread
> is supposed to be putting data in. Perhaps there's
> some subtlety in backend-frontend interaction
> involved. As I reported in one of the posts above,
> Knoppmyth on a separate frontend hung every 30-120
> minutes on average in exactly the same way when
> playing from my backend.
>
> If the problem is not readily apparent to anyone who
> understands, is there any more I can do to provide
> better information? I don't want to be a leech. My
> apologies in advance if I posted this too soon after
> last evening's posts by me and others. It seems that
> bug reports are answered pretty quickly or not at all.
>
> Thanks to all for your fine work and for any help with
> this.
>
>
Alan,
Let me see if I can help you here. I too had the screen freezes but I
did the following and now it no longer freezes. First, I originally
compiled bttv into the kernel - big mistake. I'm using 2.6.0-test11 on
gentoo and by recompiling the bttv, btaudio, etc as modules, I was able
to control the driver configs in the modules.conf (or whatever file you
use to control these things).
BTW, I followed the directions from:
http://www.linuxlogin.com/linux/ati_tv.php
and in particular I used the following (since I was using the ATI card
myself):
alias char-major-81 bttv
options bttv card=1 autoload=0 radio=0
post-install bttv insmod tuner type=2
I now have some other niggling problems but I am getting close to having
a full-working and stable MythTV setup. So my scientific (!) wild ass
guess is the kernel drivers. Have you tried to load them at boot rather
than compiling them in?
--
Cheers,
Patrick
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