[mythtv-users] Playback problem -- random short pauses

[David Edwards]

Hi all,

I've been following this thread for a while, since I am suffering from
similar playback pauses. But I've held off contributing, because had nothing
to add except touchy-feely observations. I run 0.24-fixes on

This week, however, we had a couple of evenings of terrible playback and
family members started complaining. So I thought I should take action.

I had previously noticed that the glitches often (but not always) coincided
with messages about Auto-Expire in the BE logs. I had let my disks fill up
with watched recordings and was leaving auto-expire to do its magic.

On the 2nd evening of worst playback we'd ever had, I monitored the logs on
both FE (a diskless ION) and BE boxes and kept "top" running. Neither box
was heavily loaded during the glitches, and top did not show any IO wait
time. I'm pretty sure my VDPAU decoding is working smoothly, since I can
play all these recordings fine most of the time.

So, I manually deleted a load of programs to get me back to 85% full. The
following two evenings; glitch-free playback. There was one report of a
glitch during the day from the kids, but I wasn't around to witness it.

Next step for me: I will try filling up my disks again and see if I can
consistently reproduce the problem. I am guessing I need to be recording
something at the same time as playback, for auto-expire to kick in? I might
also try stracing the BE process to see if I can spot what it's doing. If
anyone has any further suggestions on what else to do to help diagnose,
please let me know.

David
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