[mythtv-users] Playback hung

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2014 21:31:23 -0700, you wrote:

>While watching a recorded program it hung. There was no response to the 
>remote, no response to the keyboard, and no response to the mouse (which 
>I can see at the top edge of the screen while the front end is running). 
>The only solution was to power cycle the machine. While Ubuntu 12.04 
>with Gnome was booting there was a message about /tmp not being present. 
>Once the boot process was finished I opened up a nautilus window and 
>navigated to /. tmp was there, and it had a number of files and 
>directories inside it.
>
>I closed nautilus and started up the front end. It took a relatively 
>long time to start up. It took so long that I wasn't sure I had actually 
>started it and clicked on the icon I put on the top bar of the gnome 
>desktop a second time. But after a minute or so it came up. Actually, I 
>should say they came up. At first the playback was normal. But after I 
>skipped forward a number of times there was a second audio track 
>running. I couldn't figure it out until I exited the front end 
>completely only to hear the second audio track still running.
>
>Because of my overscan issue the top and bottom bars of the gnome 
>desktop are only slightly visible. I did finally notice that there was 
>an instance of the front end showing up at the bottom of the screen. 
>Clicking on it restored it and I was back to normal.
>
>So, is there ever a reason why one would want it to be possible for 
>there to be more than one instance of the front end running at the same 
>time? If not, is there a way to prevent multiple instances? I know some 
>programs do this -- Firefox and Thunderbird come to mind -- but I have 
>no idea how much is involved in making them work that way.
>
>Anyway, my original issue was related to playback freezing. Is there 
>some other way I could have recovered from that other than power cycling 
>the machine?
>
>I suppose I could have tried logging in from another machine. That 
>didn't occur to me at the time.

You can try Ctrl-Alt-F1 and log in from another tty.  Then do "restart
lightdm" to restart the display manager and X.  Or do the same via an
ssh login.

If you have a full Gnome installed, it may be that your display
manager has been changed to gdm, in which case use "restart gdm".