[mythtv-users] Problems Galore - Could it be hardware?

Reza Naima reza at reza.net
Wed Aug 27 05:01:36 EDT 2003


On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 07:35:17PM -0700, Ray Olszewski sent me this...
> At 03:29 PM 8/26/2003 -0700, Reza Naima wrote:
> >I'm still experiencing all kinds of problems, and I think I should deal
> >with the possibility that it's a hardware issue.
> [details deleted]
> 
> Well, if you at least want to eliminate Myth as a souce of the problem, 
> there are three things you should do.
> 
> 1. Verify that you can watch true (not buffered) live TV outside Myth. 
> xawtv is the usual test app for this.

No Problem  

> 2. Verify that you can record video outside Myth. You have several choices 
> here: vcr/avifile, mencoder, and ffmpeg come quickly to mind.

I'll try that.
 
> 3. Verify that you can playback video outside Myth. The obvious candidates 
> are mplayer and xine.

Will try.
 
> If all this stuff works properly, then I'd look for a Myth-specific 
> problem. If some of it turns up problems, the details may help you pinpoint 
> the source of the problem. (From what I've read here on this list, a 
> candidate source you may not have considered carefully enough is ALSA.)

Yes, I went with the Alsa drivers to start out with as per the
recommendations on the myth install pages -- however, when I switched to
OSS my problem with the audio went away.  

But shortly thereafter, I switched to linux-2.6.0-test4 and all I could
get working was alsa -- and it worked slightly better than it did with
the 2.4.20 kernel.

I'm currently trying out the 2.4.21 kernel with the preemptive, low
latency, and v4l2 patches.  I'll run the above tests using the stack of
kernels I've compiled.  However, there was one other person that posted
that he had the same high load/low cpu problem, and that his problem
would manifest itself only when watching and recording tv at the same
time.     I'll try doing that with the above apps.  
 
> I'm refraining from mentioning a lot of "obvous" hardware possibilities, 
> like DMA problems, because I assume this problem has gone on long enough 
> that you've done all the basic checks.

Yes, I've done all the sane checks, and have even found a few small bugs
that I've submitted patches for (mythtv based). 

Thanks for the suggestions!! 
Reza


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