[mythtv-users] lame error

[J.D. Bakker]

[I left in most of the original post to make future archive searches easier]

At 0:00 -0800 06-04-2003, sedwards at theedwards.org wrote:
>I've been running myth for quite a while.  Good stuff.  Thanks to 
>all for all the great work.
>I am getting this error anytime I try to view live or recorded video 
>(recent system change: new sound card that uses the es1371 driver 
>instead of the i810_audio driver):
>mythtv at puck:~/MC$ mythbackend
>Starting up as the master server.
>Probed: /dev/video - Television
>Probed: /dev/video - Composite1
>Probed: /dev/video - S-Video
>Probed: /dev/video - Composite3
>adding: puck as a player 1
>adding: puck as a player 0
>adding: puck as a player 0
>adding: puck as a remote ringbuffer
>Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV
>lame error '-3', exiting
>mythtv at puck:~/MC$
>Since it's not seg-faulting, I'm not sure if a backtrace would even 
>be reasonable.
>I've always used the oss drivers for no particular reason and 
>they've never been a problem before.  I can convert to alsa if 
>that's the way to solve the problem.

It is. I had the same problem: a two-tuner setup which would produce 
this error anytime I tried to use the second tuner. After updating 
everything else it dawned on me that the in-kernel audio drivers 
might not be the Way To Go. This afternoon I installed ALSA and 
everything seems just fine.

The ALSA-relevant portions of my (backend) modules.conf:
### update-modules: start processing /etc/modutils/alsa-jdb
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0 # on-board sound
alias snd-card-1 snd-ens1371  # SoundBlaster 4.1 Digital
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1
alias sound-service-1-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-1-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-1-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-1-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-1-12 snd-pcm-oss

### update-modules: end processing /etc/modutils/alsa-jdb

Details of my setup (if anyone cares):

Backend:
- ASUS A7N8X with an Athlon XP 2400+ (clocked as rated)
- 2x256MB PC3200 CL2 DDR running at 133/266MHz (turned out to be fastest)
- 4x Maxtor 120MB 7200RPM in RAID-5
- 2x ancient Bt848-based tuner cards (PAL)
- on-board i810-compatible audio (dsp0), ess1371-driven SoundBlaster 4.1 (dsp1)
- kernel 2.4.21-pre5-ac3, *without* extra nForce2-patches
- Debian Sarge (was Woody)
- capturing MPEG-4 default settings @ 576x576 (PAL, remember).
   With only one tuner recording this leaves the CPU >70% idle

Frontend:
- Pentium III 800, soon replaced by a Celeron 1.3GHz
- a very tiny case/mobo combo I found on eBay
- chipset: SiS630E.
   Big drawback: shared RAM. Stay away from this if at all possible, 
it *really* hurts DVD/mplayer performance. I hope the beefier Celeron 
allows me to lose some stutters
- 128MB CompactFlash root file system, everything else is NFS-mounted 
from the backend. No spinning disk = very quiet.

Hope this helps,

JDB.
-- 
LART. 250 MIPS under one Watt. Free hardware design files.
http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/