[mythtv-users] Black screen if preview has not yet played

[Michael T. Dean]

On 04/08/2008 10:58 AM, Rich West wrote:
> I have (really, the family noticed first) noticed an odd phenomenon when
> playing recordings under 0.21.  It seems that if we are too fast
> navigating and quickly select the show we wish to watch, it won't play:
> it will sit at a black screen and eventually return us back to the
> recordings page.  Now, if we wait for the little preview (we have
> previews enabled) to start up (only takes a few additional seconds) on
> the recordings page, we can play the recording with no problem.
>
> Unfortunately, we're all a bit fast, so the black screen issue seems to
> come up a lot...
>
> Is this a potential config issue here?  Something that I might not have
> set or something that needs to be set?

I/O issues causing mythfrontend to think it has read to the end of the
file.  If you wait for the preview to start up, it's able to start
reading from the already cached data, which gives the I/O subsystem time
to start pulling additional data from the file.  I don't have a
solution, just a pointer to the area that's almost definitely causing
the symptom.

Based on the symptom you're seeing, too, I'm guessing you're using a
network filesystem of some sort (as you'd probably have to be /really/
quick to see this with a locally-accessible recording--or you've got a
really messed up system :).

Mike