[mythtv-users] Mythbackend recording glitches

[Stephen Worthington]

>Thank you Greg, Stephen, and everyone else who has helped me.
>
>This has been an education and your help is very much appreciated.  Where I
>am right now is that we just watched a show that previous to my attempt at
>fixing the Mythbuntu 8 setup was unwatchable. It would crash every 10
>minutes.  We watched it without glitches or tearing on the old Mythbuntu 8
>system.
>
>There were several reasons I did the upgrade to Mythbuntu 16.  One is that
>the Mythbuntu 8 system was crashing and I thought somehow that whatever
>caused the one drive to prevent booting had damaged the main drive as I was
>seeing problems with both.  At first I had suspected the disk controller
>and that may yet be the case. Hopefully that is not the case as I will need
>three drives to do the cloning.  The other was that I wanted to see some
>improvement in video quality, commercial detection, and any other
>performance improvements ten years would have produced.  But to tell the
>truth, I saw none of that even though I put in a higher power video card
>and did get everything working, except for the occasional glitching.
>
>But the effort was not completely wasted because it was only though
>familiarizing myself again with the system that I was able to figure out
>how to stabilize the old system.  In hindsight, I should have troubleshoot
>the old system but I had all the reasons listed above to upgrade.  At first
>I thought I would need all new hardware but just thought I would give the
>old hardware a try and we all know that story. Just over that next hill.
>
>If I do find the need to continue with the upgrade at least we have learned
>some things. We know for sure that the glitching is not caused by coax,
>antenna, connectors, tuners, ethernet,etc. It may be swap or it might be
>some cron job I don't know about.  If I were to continue on the path of
>getting -16 working I would purchase THIS
><https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002N52ZO4/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A26PVB3960EU85&psc=1>
>memory. It is slower than the memory I have now but there is more of it and
>if I can add it to what I have, I would have 6GB, otherwise 4GB. But at
>this point I see no benefit for doing so. Perhaps this is because I am
>recording 720P video and watching it on a 720P display so I am not asking
>as much from the system. I don't know but it works just fine and I am tired
>of chasing one problem after another only to still not have a system as
>good as what I had ten years ago.  If that doesn't work, I would try again
>to specify all new hardware and start with a modern system.  But even that
>is not painless as I have been unable to find a case that works in my setup.
>
>At this point my plan is to clone with Clonezilla and if that doesn't work,
>I will try gparted, which is not on my old system so I would need three
>drives hooked up anyway.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Allen

The problems with video support are worst when dealing with
deinterlacing, so if your video is all 720p, that explains why it just
works.  You may also find that 1080p would just work if you had your
video settings set to 1920x1080.  Most people have to deal with 1080i
though - right around the world, 1080i is what TV is broadcast in when
they want to call it "HD", since 1080p was unable to be broadcast
using the original DVB-T, DVB-S and ATSC standards.  It is only when
DVB-T2 and DVB-S2 became available that 1080p broadcasting started,
and there are lots of older TVs that do not support DVB-T2 or DVB-S2
so they are usually only available where the broadcasters pay for a
separate frequency to broadcast 1080p on in parallel to the same
channels in 1080i or 720p.

It is easy to add an extra drive to a system temporarily.  Just leave
the covers off and sit the drive within reach of a power supply
connector - sitting on the case or next to it.  Add a SATA cable and
it will run happily like that.  If you can not get a power supply
cable to it then you might need an extension cable to do that and that
is when it gets difficult.  I have molex Y cables I can use to get an
extra molex connector and then molex to SATA power cables.  So I can
put a drive anywhere within about 30 cm without problems.  But a case
that only has two drives in it already should have one more SATA power
cable on the power supply that can be used for a third drive without
having any extra cables or needing to install it inside the case.

Have you tried installing gparted on your Mythbutu 8 system?  I am
fairly sure it was available in Ubuntu 9 back when I was using that,
so it may well be available for Ubuntu 8.  But you do have to install
the package.