[mythtv-users] Transcodes Getting Stuck

[Brian Wood]

On Tuesday, November 30, 2010 05:09:54 pm Scott & Nicole Harris wrote:
> I have had a few instances now, where transcode jobs get stuck and
> would run presumably forever.  Oddly, the last 3 times have all been
> with the same program (different episodes, obviously) and the
> progress seems to get stuck in almost the exact same spot, around
> 35%-38%.
> 
> Aside from the decidedly negative effect of this causing everything
> else in the queue to take a permanent hiatus until this job is
> stopped, it also has the nasty effect of filling up the backend log
> with line after line of this...
> 
> 2010-11-30 18:29:55.710 Couldn't open file abort.dat
> 2010-11-30 18:29:55.718 Failed to decode frame.  Position was: 0
> 
> I have had two occasions where the jobs were set up just before going
> to bed for the night, and the jobs ran for 10 hours before I
> discovered them, and the backend log was in the 100’s of MBs.
> 
> The only way I have been able to stop these jobs is to go into a
> terminal, find the PID for mythtranscode and kill it.  Then find the
> .tmp file for the job and manually delete it.  Any attempts to pause
> it, stop it, etc from the Info Center are met with failure.
> 
> I only run lossless transcodes to remove commercial cuts.
> 
> Has anyone else encountered this issue?  More importantly, is there a
> better way to kill these jobs?
> 

killall will kill jobs by name. Something like htop will allow you to 
find the process easily and kill it.