[mythtv-users] Live TV playback frustration

[Adrian Saul]

On 9/08/2012 12:09 AM, Jim Stichnoth wrote:
> These kinds of errors often indicate a deadlock in mythbackend.  A
> number of deadlocks have recently been found and fixed, with the fixes
> in the 0.26 beta.  These issues have been around for a long time, and
> they tend to be triggered by less predictable real-time events like
> watching Live TV or EIT updates.
>
> You could try out 0.26-beta (being sure to have a DB backup first),
> but that has its own set of risks.
>
> Jim

Thanks Jim - the reason I have my storage on ZFS is so I can snapshot it 
for upgrades - been bitten enough to warrant it.  I will try a later 
0.25 and then maybe 0.26 - hopefully can't make it much worse.

For the other comments about watching live TV - in this case unless we 
wait 3-4 hours for the recording to finish we have to watch it live, 
even if we are 2 hours behind.  Generally my wife just picks what she 
wants and most of the time watches it time shifted, but some programs 
she wants to watch live (Idol/Talent shows etc) because she does not 
want to be spoiled on the web.  It has got to the point where if I know 
she is watching a live recording I simply don't both doing anything 
other than watch videos on the other frontend because I know that will 
crash it, and she gets hit enough by crashes caused by other backend 
activity.

As for the question of infrastructure I believe I have mine fairly well 
honed after 6.5 years of using Myth.  Having gone through many tuners, 
changes in storage and network problems I am very confident that that is 
not the problem.  The storage, backend and frontend resources are not 
hit hard at all.  The tuners are finally stable after years of signal 
issues, model changes and using development branch driver builds.   
Stability of the OS and Myth itself is actually the best it has been in 
a long time, but these frontend errors just really are frustrating - 
especially seeing as try my best I  cannot narrow down the cause.