[mythtv-users] Watching recordings in progress

[Jason G.]

>>     So, my first question is:  Is this supposed to happen?
>
> No. I do that all the time, and I've never had a recording up and stop.
> Skipping forward gets tedious just after the program stops recording
> and commercial flagging starts, but no, what you saw shouldn't happen.
>
>> (I imagine I'm supposed to
>> be able to watch (from the beginning) something that's being recorded,
>> and
>> that the NFS setup I'm using is borking things up.)
>
> No clue. I don't use an NFS setup, but I believe plenty of folks do,
> and I've never heard of that happening... Try it again, see if you can
> make it happen again, perhaps it was a one-time fluke.

Bummer, because it's completely repeatable!  :(

I see the following messages on the frontend:
----
2004-01-28 22:04:42 Connecting to backend server: 172.16.0.9:6543 (try 1 of
5)
Error loading image file:
/usr/local/share/mythtv/themes/default/1012_20040128220000_20040128223000.nu
v.png
Input #0, mpeg, from '/mnt/store//1012_20040128220000_20040128223000.nuv':
  Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg2video, 720x480, 29.97 fps
  Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, 384 kb/s
Input #0, mpeg, from '/mnt/store//1012_20040128220000_20040128223000.nuv':
  Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg2video, 720x480, 29.97 fps
  Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, 384 kb/s
Using the PVR-350 decoder/TV-out
2004-01-28 22:04:51 Changing from None to WatchingRecording
----

The backend log doesn't show any messages out of the ordinary.

Back on the frontend, when I try to delete the partial recording, I get the
following right before it hangs:

2004-01-28 22:06:37 ReadStringList timeout.

That's something can probably chase down in the code, but I think the reason
is that the backend has puked.  After restarting the frontend (without
restarting the backend) a connection to the backend times out when trying to
watch live TV.

> I've not had a program fail to finish recording in ages, but when I
> did, there were never any problems like this. Perhaps you've got some
> disk performance issues...

Could be.  I'll be rebuilding my server over the weekend once the new RAID 5
system gets here, so perhaps that will help.  I don't get the feeling,
though, that the server is that burdened, though, as it's just running NFS
and largely idle (the mythbackend and frontend are on the same box).  I
think that the only times that recordings haven't succeeded, it's been due
to this problem.  I have noticed, though, that sometimes the backend
believes that it's still recording, even though it isn't.  In those cases,
the frontend doesn't want to play live tv because it believes that a
recording is in progress.  Restarting the frontend doesn't help.  The
backend status page (port 6544) even says it's not recording.

I think I'll try grabbing the latest CVS for myth and see what that does for
me...

J