[mythtv-users] My experience with MythTV annoyances, 0.20-fixes version

Yeechang Lee ylee at pobox.com
Mon Oct 30 09:08:59 UTC 2006


Back in June I wrote a message
(<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/208552#208552>)
listing the few, minor remaining annoyances with my MythTV 0.19-fixes
system (and the Fedora Core 4 box it runs on). Now that I've been
running 0.20-fixes for more than six weeks, I'm going to revisit that
list.

> * The FireWire issue.

[...]

> Since then I've switched over to the daisy-chained, all
> point-to-point setup for multiple boxes the Wiki describes with,
> unfortunately, no change to the status quo.

Status: Resolved. After an unfortunate few days with 0.20 (see
<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/223793#223793>),
this was resolved with Jim Westfall's help. I've also been able to
make sure FireWire always works (No more manual jumpstarts needed!)
after a reboot with the following in /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

echo "Jumpstarting FireWire"
/usr/local/bin/firewire_tester -v -b -n 1 # See output from 'plugreports'
/usr/local/bin/firewire_tester -v -B -n 1 # to determine what to put after
/usr/local/bin/firewire_tester -v -b -n 3 # '-n'
/usr/local/bin/firewire_tester -v -B -n 3

> * Occasionally, when my box reboots, the Fedora booting process halts
> at the "Initializing hardware . . . audio" portion.

Status: Likely resolved. I haven't seen this in a few months and,
presumably, a Fedora update of some kind has taken care of it.

> * When watching Letterman, Leno, and Conan (US late-night talk
> shows)--all broadcast in high definition--and the shows show a clip
> of a movie the guest being interviewed is promoting, the clip is
> usually in 4:3 standard definition. When the clip starts, the sound
> and video get out of sync, and this continues after the clip ends
> and we return to the host and guest. Pausing and unpausing fixes
> this issue, but otherwise it's quite mystifying because most
> commercials are still in 4:3 SD and I've *never* seen a commercial
> cause sound and video to go out of sync.

Status: Unknown. Again, I haven't seen this in a few months, but I've
also been more often deleting these talk shows after the opening
monologue and initial skit, so I don't have enough data points on
whether this is actually fixed.

> * I use a 2TB Infrant ReadyNAS 600 to store my recordings. Infrant's
> decision to use ext3--which blocks all writes during deletes and is
> very slow at doing them--as the filesystem instead of something like
> xfs or jfs means that I will lose about 30-60 seconds of whatever
> I'm recording if I delete a recording of about 7.5GB or greater in
> size.

Status: Almost-completely resolved. Thanks to Boleslaw Ciesielski's
truncated-delete functionality (and Michael Dean for debugging an
issue with CIFS), this is no longer an issue with 0.20. (I do have to
work aorund another CIFS issue with an hack I outline at
<URL:http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/2364>.

mythtranscode doesn't yet use the 0.20 truncated-delete feature to get
rid of originals after each transcode. I followed Michael Dean's
suggestion at
<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/230560#230560>
to preserve the originals and delete them when no recording is
occurring, but wanted to automate this further, so have come up with
the following exceedingly-ugly, Fedora-specific hack:

    #!/bin/bash

    /sbin/service mythbackend status 2>&1 | \
    grep -q "is running" && \
    /usr/bin/links -dump --no-numbering --no-references \
    http://localhost/mythweb/status 2>&1 | \
    grep -q "and is recording: " || \
    rm -rf /misc/cube/mythtv/store/*.old

I also have the following in my crontab, all on one line:

6,16,26,36,46,56        *       *       *       *
nice -n 19 ~/bin/deleteoldtranscodes

This way, when mythbackend is running, within ten minutes after any
recording is completed and another recording isn't in progress, all
.old files will be deleted. (By the way, I first tried using
http://localhost:6544, but I found that for some reason piping the
output from this into links or lynx will inevitably crash mythbackend
after a few times. I know I should file a ticket but haven't had a
chance to generate a tracelog yet.)

There is one issue I neglected to mention in my original message,
which I describe at <URL:http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/1941> and
<URL:http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/799>. The only new, unresolved
issue 0.20 has brought to bear is
<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/223910#223910>.
I still find it hard to believe that others are happy with menu
transitions that take several seconds to complete!

Overall, I'm very pleased by how much progress has occurred on my list
of annoyances. The truncated-delete and improved FireWire
functionalities took care of the two major issues, and the rest is
more cosmetic than anything else. As always, many thanks to MythTV's
developers; you guys are great!

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list