[mythtv-users] MythTV frontend/backend race condition?

[Shane Warren]

I have been playing with MythTV for about 3 months or more now trying to 
get one machine to be both a frontend and a backend (for now at least).  
First let me say it works great when it works.  I'm about at my whits 
end, and I'm *gasp* even considering getting a Tivo again after I went 
and sold mine (I sooo don't want to get another one).  My MythTv machine 
is as follows:

Athlon 2500+
Abit NF7-S V2
512 RAM
GF4 MX4400
Integrated Audio
1 PVR-250MCE (actually 2 but only 1 is in the machine as of right now)

This is all running on kernel 2.4.22 (also tried 2.6.2) on Gentoo using 
MythTV 0.14 and ivtv drivers 0.19

The problem I have been having is that if I start up mythbackend and 
then start mythfrontend and fire up live TV, everything appears to work 
great for somewhere between 4-8 hours then the video/audio get really 
really choppy (progressively more so as time goes on).  If I ssh into 
the machine I see mythfrontend and mythbackend are both competing for 
100% of the cpu (backend using 49.1 frontend using the rest, when mythtv 
is running normally it is using around 1-2% of the cpu or less).  On the 
terminal where mythfrontend is started I see "prebuffering pause" about 
once a second or sometimes more than once a second.  One other thing is 
that if I kill mythfrontend at this point (with a: killall mythfrontend) 
then the mythbackend thread that was using all the cpu also goes away.

I have tried everything besides swapping out the CPU/Ram, some of the 
things I've tried:

Tried a 2.4 and a 2.6 kernel.
Updated nvidia drivers to the latest ones (5336 I think as of now).
Swapped out the motherboard for another.
Tested my memory in the machine for about 3 days straight using memtest86.
Tried different versions of mythtv (0.13 and 0.12, and latests cvs).
Tried different versions of ivtv
Tried turning off/on every possible option related to recorded TV in MythTV.

A couple of questions:

Does anyone else run somewhat the same setup I run (I know some people 
run w/ this same exact motherboard and many people use the nforce2 
chipset), and if so is it stable watching live TV for extended periods 
of time.

Can anyone offer any suggestions on what can fix this problem?

Thanks,

Shane Warren