[mythtv-users] System freeze when "Watch TV"

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Wed May 7 10:18:23 EDT 2003


 From what you write, it is unclear whether this is a MythTV problem or not.

The output you see when starting mythbackend is normal for a low-end AverTV 
board (or at least it is what I see on my working system).

Assuming you start mythfrontend from an xterm, you need to devise some way 
to look at its STDERR output. Since the system hard freezes, by your 
account, the usual approaches will not work. Try starting mythfrontend with 
output redirection, something like this:

         mythfrontend >/tmp/mythtv.txt 2>&1

Then after a crash and reboot, you can (probably ... filesystem sync'ing 
remains an issue) see what mythfrontend was reporting to STDOUT and STDERR 
by checking that file. That might tell you where your problem is.

(BTW, I notice that mythbackend and mythfilldatabase both create log files 
by default, but mythfrontend does not. Is there some design reason for this 
difference, or is it just one of those "need to get around to it" omissions?).

Three final thoughts ...

First, what X server are you running? (What video card, that is ... not 
what version of X.) A Cel 1.1 is plenty fast for a system that supports 
xvideo, but it will fail miserably if the X server requires xShm.

Second, the lack of ALSA support is likely to prove to be a problem, (just 
barely) possibly enough of one to cause the failure you are seeing (what 
sound modules *are* you using? do you know that they work with your 
hardware?). FOr this to cause "live" TV watching to fail would not surprise 
me, but for it to go so far as to cause a hard crash does.

Third, how much (real, not swap) RAM does the system have? If you have a 
way to watch this (say an ssh session), what is "top" showing just before 
the hard crash in the way of CPU and RAM use?

At 08:35 AM 5/7/2003 -0700, Vince Busam wrote:
>I'm new to MythTV.  Just installed it from RPMs on RedHat 9.  CPU is 1.1 GHz
>Celeron, no-name system.  Capture card is AverTV.  Did not install ALSA.
>
>Installation seemed to go OK.  When I start mythbackend from command prompt, I
>sometimes see a lot of output, such as:
>
>i2c-core.o: i2c core module
>i2c-algo-bit.o: i2c bit algorithm module
>i2c-core-o: adapter bt848 #0 registered as adapter 0.
>bttv0: using tuner=2
>i2c-core-o: driver generic i2c audio driver registered.
>i2c-core-o: driver i2c TV tuner driver registered.
>tuner: probing bt848 #0 i2c adapter [id=0x10005]
>tuner: chip found @ 0xc2
>bttv0: ic2 attach [client=Philips MTSC (F1236 and compati,ok]
>ic2-core-o: client [Philips MTSC (F11236 and compati] registered to adapter
>[bt848 #0](pos. 0).
>bttv0: PLL: 28636363 => 35468950 ... ok
>bttv0: PLL: switching off
>
>I always see this output:
>
>Starting up as the master server.
>Probed: /dev/video0 - Television
>Probed: /dev/video0 - Composite1
>Probed: /dev/video0 - S-Video
>
>I also sometimes see:
>
>audio volume set to '32768'
>
>or a message that the client connected (after I start mythfront end):
>
>adding: c11g as a player 1
>
>When I type "space" at "Watch TV" my system freezes, e.g. ctrl-alt-F1 doesn't
>work.  I have to push the reset button to recover.
>
>I'm not sure how to find the bttv driver files, but do have files bt819.0,
>bt856.0, and bttv.o in directory
>/lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/drivers/media/video.
>
>The output from lsmod includes tuner, tvaudio, bttv, ic2-algo-bit, ic2-core,
>videodev, soundcore (all autoclean), and others.
>
>I put the card in a Windows 2000 system and it works there with AverMedia's
>software.
>
>I realize this probably isn't a MythTV code problem, but I sure can use some
>advice on what I can try to get MythTV working.  All suggestions will be 
>greatly
>appreciated.







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