[mythtv-users] Help, after 1 month perfection, system now stutters

[rosenbla at uchastings.edu]

About 1-2 months ago our VCR died and I refused to buy a new one so my wife had no choice but to use MythTV.

She is now very happy with it and would like to keep using it but ever since Tuesday night all recordings having missed frames and audio this happens about every 10-30 seconds throughout the recording. It appears to have started 30 minutes into a 2 hour show on Tuesday night. All shows since then have the same stuttering. 

My system is a Gentoo EPIA 10000N with a M179 (ivtv 0.1.9 ebuild from alterself). To debug I have copied some recordings over to a windows computer and found that they contain the same stuttering in the same places as when played on the EPIA, thus concluding it is the recording and not the playback. I have a 7200 RPM drive and have recording profile set to Mpeg PS with 4.5 mbit ave and 6 mbit max (I have a small TV). All of this was working great without stuttering for over a month. I did not upgrade or change the system in anyway on Tuesday night (or in the last week for that matter) when the problem seems to have randomly started in the middle of recording. The only recent event was a power outage a day before on Monday. On which I had to force clean the JFS partition holding the recordings. But the file system is fixed and I am still having the problem. Right now, I am thinking the worst that maybe the encoding card is damaged. 

I have also tried increasing the mpg_buffers parameter of ivtv and setting the debug mode to 1 and turning on extra buffer, jitter reduction in playback. None of this has had any effect. 

Since turning on ivtv debug=1 I have seen the following new messages, however it is still recording but with the stuttering….
ivtv: loaded
ivtv: 100 ms time out waiting for firmware
ivtv: api call 0x000000d2
ivtv: 100 ms time out waiting for firmware
ivtv: api call 0x000000c3
ivtv: stop_fw error 3. Code -16
i2c-core.o: adapter unregistered: ivtv i2c driver #0
ivtv: You've not seen the last of willy!

Anyone have an idea of what might have gone wrong and how to fix it, or do I have to buy my wife a VCR???

-Brad