[mythtv-users] strange intermittant mythfrontend internal player audio issue

[Nick Cabatoff]

Hi,

I've been running mythtv on the same box since October.  At some point a
few months ago, something strange happened to the audio generated by the
internal player in mythfrontend.  It's a little hard to describe: it
becomes higher pitched, as though it were accelerated - but it stays in
sync with the video.  The first 1/2 second or so of playback is fine,
but then it changes.  

The problem doesn't affect any other software (mplayer, xine, etc.) and
isn't hardware related: I tried using another soundcard and the problem
occurs with it as well.  But running the same version of mythfrontend on
another host (connecting to the same backend) works fine.

When it first occurred I didn't have much time to investigate it, and it
eventually went away by itself.  Now it's reared its head again a couple
of days ago, so I'm hoping to get to the bottom of it before it
disappears again.

I'd welcome any ideas as to what might be going on.  I'd also be
interested in any workarounds to use a different player than the
internal one for DVD videos played back from the hard disk.  For some
reason although mplayer is invoked for e.g. .avi files (thanks to the
VideoDefaultPlayer setting I presume), it doesn't get used for on-HDD
DVDs.  I've got mythdvd installed, and mythdvd.DVDPlayerCommand doesn't
seem to be getting used - I'm guessing it only applies to physical DVDs
inserted into a DVD-ROM device?  I was able to work around the problem
for individual movies by setting a playcommand, but it's not practical
to apply that to all my movies.

I'm running Ubuntu 7.04, 2.6.20-15-generic with the following packages
installed:

	mythtv-backend        0.20-svn20070122-0.0ubuntu6
	mythtv-backend-master 0.20-svn20070122-0.0ubuntu6
	mythtv-common         0.20-svn20070122-0.0ubuntu6
	mythtv-database       0.20-svn20070122-0.0ubuntu6
	mythtv-frontend       0.20-svn20070122-0.0ubuntu6

I don't think the hardware details are relevant, but I'll provide them
upon request.  I've also put a file at
http://web.cs.mcgill.ca/~ncc/mythfrontend.log.gz which is the output
from 'mythfrontend -v all' when I watch the first few seconds of a
recorded show.  It's a little large to spam the list with.