[mythtv-users] MythTV hangs entire system while watching (was MythTv crashes while watching or commercial flagging content recorded from Hauppauge HD PVR)

[Brian Edmonds]

I've been experiencing this crash with an audio loop for months now, and put
it down to a flaky system. Up until yesterday...

All but one of the crashes have been on a homebuilt 3Gz Core Duo box with
onboard Intel video running 0.21 on Debian unstable (and previously Lenny,
with the same crashes) connecting to the TV with an AVI to HDMI cable. But
yesterday, after getting tired of the crashes (and the cooling problems, and
the noise) I built a new system running 0.22 (built from source, as always)
on an Acer AR1600 Atom+Ion box with the current Ubuntu Lucid beta, currently
connecting to the TV with plain VGA, as I don't have an HDMI to HDMI cable
yet. And lo and behold, it crashed in just the same way last night while
watching SVU. (I know VDPAU is working since CPU use is negligible.) Apart
from sharing a wireless keyboard (USB), a Streamzap remote, and displaying
on a Samsung LCD, these systems could not be physically much more different,
which leads me to suspect myth.

(Oh, and they do share the same backend, an Intel quad core running Debian
Lenny, which has been serving since at least the 0.18 days, and has been
using a pair of Pinnacle USB capture devices since we switched to US
broadcast OTA. The frontends were both connected to the same wall port which
routes to a Netgear gigabit switch in the machine closet that the backend
connects to directly. We also watch lots from our laptops (Lenovo X41
tablets running Ubuntu, one Gutsy and one Hardy), and have never experienced
one of these crashes there.)

One interesting tidbit about the crashes, is that on both systems the
computer has required a second cold boot to work properly. On the prior
machine, I would shut it down by holding down the power button until the
power supply would turn off. Then when turning on again, it would not go
anywhere, not even a BIOS splash screen. Another hard power off and on would
be needed, then it would boot and run normally. On the new system it booted
after the hard power off, but the video was stuck in an Ubuntu splash screen
and X startup failed. I could ssh into the machine, but couldn't figure out
a way to recover it. Not even a software reboot cleared the splash screen,
but a shutdown and cold reboot brought it back normally.

So, any ideas? Any more useful information I can supply? System logs have
not previously provided any useful reports at the time of the crash, which
I'd always previously put down to dodgy memory or system overheating. I've
been poking through the recent mail archives, and this report was the only
thing that jumped out at me, particularly the looping audio bit.

Brian.
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