[mythtv-users] Playback hung

[Hika van den Hoven]

Hoi Dick,

Monday, March 17, 2014, 5:31:23 AM, 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.

If you want to prevent frontend or any program from starting twice,
you have to add a check like:
Test=`ps -A | grep mythfrontend`
[ "$Test" != "" ] || mythfrontend
to your startup script.

Tot mails,
  Hika                            mailto:hikavdh at gmail.com

"Zonder hoop kun je niet leven
Zonder leven is er geen hoop
Het eeuwige dilemma
Zeker als je hoop moet vernietigen om te kunnen overleven!"

De lerende Mens
--