[mythtv-users] Impressive, but some minor issues

[Gavin Haslett]

Greetings,
 
I've recently bit the bullet and built myself a rather nice little MythBox. Not much in terms of hardware; Athlon 800 I had lying around, 60Gb hard drive dedicated to video etc. etc. I know, not very impressive, but so far I've been impressed with the results.
 
I do have a couple of minor issues though, and I need to see if anyone else is having these problems;
 
1) Apparently at random, mythbackend seems to stop. There's nothing unusual in the logs... it just appears that I turn on my TV to find mythfrontend complaining about the lack of a backend, and I have to go in and restart mythbackend. 
 
Since this machine is intended for my wife to use as well as me, this obviously isn't always an option (I'm a UNIX, Windows and Novell guy... she has trouble with Windows XP at times) and I don't feel like VPN'ing in from work every time she complains that it died, I created a little script that checks every minute if the backend is running and "kicks it back in" if it's not. Not perfect and a little annoying. There doesn't appear to be anything unusual in the logs, the only entry I see is when the script kicks the mythbackend on again, other than that nothing. Any ideas on this one?
 
2) This morning I attempted to record Quantum Leap. Yeah, I'm an old-school geek. Now, so far recording's been doing great, but this morning the show recorded OK, but I saw no jobs for commercial flagging or transcoding, and a show that was transcoding last night apparently was still in a "stopping" state (there are two more jobs in the queue that are still unprocessed, but Quantum Leap wasn't in the list). Anyway, lacking anything else to do I rebooted the entire system... figured it would save time. When it came back up, no QL. It was completely missing from the Recordings list, and from the Previously Recorded list. When I checked the HD, the .nuv file was there, but apparently an entry never got made to SQL. Any thoughts on that one?
 
Since I'm really only in a testing mode right now, I'm not that worried about the loss of one episode of Quantum Leap... I was just playing with the box and not worried about it, but I don't want this happening again if possible.
 
FYI, I don't see anything in the logs to suggest that mythbackend crashed last night, though it does look like the mythtranscode process may have hung and screwed something up.
 
Oh, and after the reboot, the transcoding of that show that was "stopping" apparently started again. We'll see when I get home tonight what the logs look like.
 
Any suggestions for a MythTV noob?
 
Gavin