[mythtv-users] Waited 2 seconds... Still... Any more ideas?

[Gert van der Knokke]

I'm experiencing the same freezes too on this system:

Asus Pundit
256 Mb DDR400 RAM
40 Gb Samsung Harddisk
Celeron 2.4 GHz
Pixelview PlayTV Pro TV card

Sometime the system runs fine for an hour or so and then suddenly the 
harddisk light goes from 'blink' mode (ones a second or so) to constant 
on and after a few minutes the screen freezes.
Changing channels sometimes gets out this lockup (if I see the harddisk 
light steady on I change the channel and it goes back to blink mode again)
When frozen the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace salute kills the frontend and 
restarts the X server and all is fine for sime time again.

Sometimes changing channels actually triggers this frantic harddisk action.

I assume there is some kind of race condition between the reading and 
writing of the ringbuffer.

In the log files there are no clues whatsoever.

Playing movies or music never causes trouble.
I added the 'direct TV' option in the TV menu (using xawtv) so I can 
enjoy 'live TV' without freezes.. :-)

Another question (dumb probably):
Why is the picture in xawtv so much sharper than 'live TV' ? Does this 
have anything to do with de-interlacing ? Is the videodata compressed 
when it is inserted into the ringbuffer ?


Gert van der Knokke