[mythtv-users] HD-PVR: Encoding Errors Running 0.22

Jeremy Thornhill jeremy.thornhill at gmail.com
Wed Nov 25 18:45:18 UTC 2009


On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:00:12 -0800 (PST), Mike Smith
<easygreenus at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> The mythbackend logs have these type of messages in the area where a skip occurs.
> These were from recording ESPN News.  The video was a replay of an basketball game
> where a player was being interviewed and a replay of his dunk was on the screen.
>
> What do these messages indicate?
>
> 2009-11-21 03:30:08.598 Started recording: ESPNEWS: channel 3305 on cardid 6, sourceid 2
> 2009-11-21 03:30:36.763 DevRdB(/dev/video0) Error: Poll giving up
> 2009-11-21 03:30:36.767 MPEGRec(/dev/video0) Error: Device error detected
> 2009-11-21 03:30:36.769 DevRdB(/dev/video0): Stop(): Not running.

You are not alone!

I'd been running with an hd-pvr on a patched .21 fixes for several
months with a pretty high degree of success. Infrequently there would
be the odd failed recording, but that was usually attributable to my
cable box 'flaking out.'

Recently I updated to .22 and have been seeing more and more errors
like yours - only, unlike you, they always appear at the *beginning*
of a recording. When the failure occurs, the 'poll giving up' 'device
error detected' messages are recorded in the backend log. If I look at
the hd pvr unit itself, I can watch the blue light turn on and off in
time with these messages. Usually (but not always) some minutes later
the recordings stabilize and mythtv starts writing to a file.

I can't discern any pattern as to *why* this happens. Sometimes I can
record all day without seeing the problem, other times show after show
fails to start properly and I'm left with several hours of unusable or
partial recordings. I've compensated for this by padding the 'start
time' for recordings by a few minutes, which is normally adequate time
for things to start properly, but sometimes it's not. I've had entire
half hour recordings fail like this for the whole program run.

I've tried to replicate the failures using 'cat' but I've never had a
problem that way. It could just be I've never tried this at the right
(wrong) time.

FWIW my STB is locked at 720P, using optical (though I tried RCA with
no difference), changing channels with firewire, including a 5 second
sleep at the end of the channel change script. I'd LOVE to get some
clues as to what's happening here! I'm starting to vaguely suspect
that a recent update to the STB is causing some kind of issue, but I
don't know why that would be the case (video seems fine when I output
from the HD PVR's passthrough to my TV, or when I use 'cat').

Jeremy


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