[mythtv-users] HDTV playback woes

James Armstrong james at thearmstrongs.org
Wed Oct 13 01:12:09 UTC 2004


Doug Larrick wrote:

 > James Armstrong wrote:
 >
 >> I am having a problem I can't seem to figure out. For the last month
 >> or so I have not been able to watch most of my hd recordings. I have
 >> been running the latest cvs versions as they come out. I don't know
 >> if it is a recording issue with patches or a playback issue.
 >
 >
 > Those are some pretty messed up messages.  Something's seriously wrong
 > here, all right.
 >
 > If you copy (part of) a recording directly to somewhere on your
 > frontend, can you play it with the 'mythtv' command?  mplayer?
 >
 > You snipped out the line that says what video sync method you're
 > using.  OpenGL?  RTC?  usleep w/ busy wait?
 >
 > You do have 'extra audio buffering' enabled, right?
 >
 > What's the ALSA version on your frontend, and the one you're building
 > against?  Go through the past month or so of the -dev list for
 > discussion.
 >
Ok, I finally figured out what part of the problem was. I noticed that
when I tried to mythcommflag from the frontend, it was running forever,
logging frames way past the actual filesize. It turned out that I had
been mounting the recordings directory on the frontend in /mnt/store and
the frontend tries that directory for direct file access before
streaming it from the backend. I was using samba and all the hdtv files
I was trying to playback were over the 2gig file limit. Whenever
playback got to the file size limit, it would wrap and start playing
from the beginning of the file again. I changed it to nfs today and was
able to finish watching a Joan of Arcadia that would always loop back to
the beginning about 35 minutes in. I will try it without the directory
mounted to see if it gets better. I noticed that I was able to get
playback to lockup a few times tonight when it was accessing the file
using /mnt/store directly.

- James


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