[mythtv-users] DVD drive confused or needs reset

Jonathan Rogers jonner at teegra.net
Thu Oct 18 13:24:53 UTC 2007


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I'm pretty sure this issue isn't specific to MythTV, but a more general
Linux issue. Once in a while, after Linux has trouble reading a disc, it
will continue to fail with the same error at the same sector of the disc
every time after that.

Usually, this results from a scratched, smudged or otherwise flaky disc.
I'll be watching the movie and the player will exit with a read error.
If I restart the player, the player will exit at exactly the same point
every time. If I reboot completely, I can usually watch the rest of the
movie, indicating the read error was somewhat transient. Even stranger
is that if I put a different disc in, Linux will complain about the same
problem at the same place on the disc.

It seems that Linux cannot be convinced that the media has changed,
regardless of how many times the tray is opened and closed. This only
happens once in a while. Most of the time there's a read error, it'll
recover just fine, at least after changing the disc. However, when it
does happen, it's a major annoyance, since right now I can't watch any
DVDs without rebooting my combined machine, which may be recording or
transcoding.

I've seen this behavior with two different ATAPI DVD+RW drives (one's LG
and one's Pioneer), which are at /dev/hdc. It seems like it must be a
Linux bug, rather than hardware. I've been living with this for quite a
long time (over several Ubuntu kernel images) since it's not that
frequent, but I wonder if anyone else has seen it or has any idea why or
how to fix it.

Jonathan Rogers
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