[mythtv-users] Fast Forward locks up my MythBox

[Jeff Simpson]

On 3/31/06, mikerice1969 at comcast.net <mikerice1969 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Not good news.
>
> From: "Jeff Simpson" <jeffsimpson at alum.wpi.edu>
> > On 3/31/06, mikerice1969 at comcast.net <mikerice1969 at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > FFW (and RWD) have bugs with the PVR-350 on 0.19 causing the frontend to
> > lock up (doesn't normally require a reboot, are you sure the box isn't
> still
> > alive and just not listening to the frontend and keyboard?)
>
> About 10% of the time for me it will only crash the frontend.  90% of the
> time just FFWD at 3x will lock up the machine completely requiring a reboot.
>  (The drive light has stopped ad well as the keyboard... pretty dead.)
>

I can crash the frontend just by doing any rapid combination of play, pause,
FF, RW, etc. It just doesn't respond well to commands like that. I've had it
refuse to pause or exit before because it was hung trying to FF or RW.
Usually I wait awhile and it's fine, sometimes I have to log in via SSH and
kill X and restart it. (X that is, not the computer)

It sounds like my situation is more severe than some others.  From the
> thread mentioned it looks like most can FF at 3x without crashing but I
> certainly cannot.
>

I don't try it. FF at 3x is just asking for trouble with these bugs.

I'll be looking into that if no one else has a suggestion.  I will look into
> the crash too but having no particular background in video it'll likely take
> me awhile to figure out what is going on.
>

Basically the difference between video out on a normal card and video out on
the PVR-350 is that the 350 is actually doing mpeg out. the ivtv driver has
some kind of control allowing it to receive an mpeg file to play. It's meant
to start and stop playing, not fast forward, rewind, etc. Making those
features work on a normal card is trivial compared to the 350, so nobody
ever got around to making the 350 work again with all the changes in 0.19. I
looked around in code but couldn't find where it was being done (or even
where the chunk of code to handle the pvr-350 mpeg output was).


> I do have a couple other video cards with TV-out so I will likely try them
> so I can isolate it to the PVR-350 TV-out.
>

If you go into the  MythTV setup, you can just uncheck the box that says
"Use PVR-350 MPEG output". It will then use the normal xvideo output, and
hopefully work fine. It will be a heckuvalot slower and eat up your CPU like
candy, but it will tell you where the problem lies without needing you to
open up the case. You will probably notice soem jumping/jittering when using
xvideo to play mpeg, though, that is being discussed in a few other threads
on here.

 -Jeff
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