[mythtv-users] Crashing when watching LiveTV

[Gregory J. McGee]

Congratulations!

(apologies in advance, this got REAL long)

I finally got mine running after > a month of part time frustration,
turned out the audio was ~90% of the work. 

2.6.3-4mdk, Nforce2//FIC AU11 K7-2100+ at 2160 (190x???) Avertv Stereo with
patchcord, as neither btaudio or snd-bt87x wanted to make any noise,in
spite of loading. (I think a line or two on the card are not connected)

I have been running Mandrake Cooker ("urpmi --auto --auto-select"  daily
from cron) since I got Myth up (> 1 month), and using the THAC RPMS for
9.2... Works fine. Go figure. 

My backend has _never_ crashed, frontend only occasionally when seeking
(past?) end of shows. The only reboots are to upgrade kernels, and after
KDE3.2 got installed, just in case.

I tried building a "Myth" box using a handy Soyo Dragon lite and a Duron
850, but the MB was such a POS that I finally abandoned that and got
Mythtv "down" on my "production box" which is to say my desktop I use
for everything.

(save for a recent Myth issue with "Recording Priorities", it now
insists I have no scheduled recordings, will hack on that tonight)

I think that's ~ MDK 10 Community released a day or so ago.

I recently retried getting Knoppmyth installed just for fun after a full
system backup, (knoppmyth is where I started) and after all the practice
I have had, it took longer to do the updates required (xmltv in the
distro is too old, must upgrade first) than to get it running.

Using the stone-axe simple to set up OSS drivers and aumix, audio is no
longer hell to set up. (modprobe intel8x0) Alsa lacked volume controls
from some programs (xmms, even with artswrapper) and regardless of what
I did, ALSA would never quite work "right" (Under Mandrake, with myth) .

Unfortunately Mythtv 0.11 just lacked features like mythweb that allow
for fine tuning easily etc.(even alsa worked when I "apt-get install
auimix and used aumix -S after muting line in)

As to the crashes, the memory/mb would be my first guess, DL the SUSE
live CD or something else with a memory test and thrash it for a few
hours.  

The fine tuning brings up another (possibly) relevant point---You are
probably speaking of something else, but many people have issues when
you change channels, the screen goes red or black, usually blamed on the
current BTTV drivers. I really just record off one channel, SciFi due to
this partly, but it usually about the only channel I get that has
anything worth recording...

To me, it ALMOST looks like MythTv is ignoring its fine tuning, it ONLY
get is right the first time AFAICT, at least on my box.

Everyone so far blames the latest versions of bttv, tvtime has the same
issue from all appearances, but xawtv does NOT, which indicates to me
it's NOT the drivers, or at least xawtv does something "wrong" that
works around the bug. If I could program to save my life, I would start
there.

The only "complaint" I have with MythTv now is having to use the slow as
hell (but nice quality) conversion to "dvd" manually via nuvencode...
and NOT have myth transcode automatically, as by the time it goes from
rtjpeg>divx>mpeg2, it looks like hell. 

I pray someday the authors of mythtv will use a standard format, even
nuv (not hacked) so the nice divx mythtv generates internally can be
exported without further loss via mendoder and friends. (vo copy ao
copy...) I want to archive, as many do.

Better Idea:Feature add suggestion---
Video collection management, you're 99% there: handle removable media,
keep "archived" shows in the db, with a disk name, when selecting, pop
up "insert disk xxx in /dev/scd0" or such.

One could always archive the native myth-nuv files, and just keep
managing everything from within myth.

I have been using vobview to generate DVDs and sanity check the mpgs, it
seems to work well on the vobs, havent cut a dvd lately with it, but
I've used it in the past with no issues. (rename mpegs .vob, and watch
your paths)

BTW, automatic commercial skip does NOT work on SciFi, no blank frames
usually, just goes to commercial immediately (easily seen in vobview or
avidemux2) This is not really Mythtvs fault, seems intentional by scifi.
Their start/stop times are also...fuzzy by seconds or even minutes.
(I am running ntp, dubious they are;-)

Other than those minor quibbles, Mythtv is an AWESOME program.
 
>Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 11:31:48 -0500 (EST)
>From: Aaron Johnson <aajohnso at mbhs.edu>
>Subject: [mythtv-users] Crashing when watching LiveTV
>To: mythtv-users at mythtv.org
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.50.0403071115040.1721-100000 at binx.mbhs.edu>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

After much trouble I finally got MythTV 0.14 working on my Pentium III
900Mhz, 512MB ram, TNT2 Ultra, WinTV FM, SB Live, Red Hat 9, 2.6.3
kernel
box. After much tweaking (including fixing the IRQ conflict with the
nic, getting rid of the graphics card that didnt support Xv, compiling a
new kernel, install/compile issues, etc), it now encodes and decodes
video at a good quality. The only problem is that it crashes after a
while, from 2-15 min after I switch to LiveTV. It is a very effective
crash, everythign stays as is (including video output and whatever tone
was on audio output, numlock/caps lock stay as is, power button is
useless). 
At first i thought the proc was overheating (as it was like 100F at the
bios screen even after i added 2 more fans), but i added some new
thermal interface compound and that brought it down to about 90F at the
bios. I ran a CPU burn-in thing for over an hour and a half without it
failing, so i dont think it could be the proc overheating. It has never
died recording video (even over an hour), or watching video using Xawtv.
A few times after it has died i've opened it up quickly to see if
anything seemed like it was overheating (ram, video card, etc), but
couldnt find anything too hot.
The only other real problem is that it has a hard time reading the Vbi
data. I'm not sure why MythTV is the only program that has so much
trouble with this, but more that half of the time it comes up dark and
redish, with a vbi error. This has never happened to me with Xawtv, or
with any windows app. I havent had time to read all of the past posts on
this issue, it isnt as big of a problem as the crashing problem.

Thanks,Aaron


-- 
Gregory J. McGee <gjmcgee at cableone.net>