[mythtv-users] Can mythtv handle two dumb capture cards?

[Adam Bown]

I had exactly the same problem with a single DVB card.  I found that I had a
weak DVB signal, which was causing myth to log errors.  This logging seemed
to be what was causing the drain on resources and in turn caused the buffer
overflows etc. 

My system got in a sort of downward spiral where the weaker the channels
signal, the more disk access that was going on and consequently the worse it
ground to a halt.

Eventually I managed to tune the card to another transmitter and all these
problems went away, on a system that is probably less than half the speed of
yours. (AMD 1Ghz).

I'm no expert with myth unfortunately so I've no idea if this is common, but
it might be worth checking your signal strength and trying a booster.  I
think myth is it's own worst enemy when it comes to logging signal errors.

I'm sure I'll get told off for saying that but never mind.

Hope this helps.

Adam.

-----Original Message-----
From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of Adam Felson
Sent: 21 July 2004 15:05
To: mythtv-users at mythtv.org
Subject: [mythtv-users] Can mythtv handle two dumb capture cards?

My system is an athlon XP 3000 w/ two bt878 capture cards. 
I'm getting tons of "ran out of free AUDIO buffers :-(" errors on the
backend and tons of "Audio buffer overflow, audio data lost!" on the
frontend.  About 1 in 10 recordings will have hiccups where the video
will have trouble spots -- "black holes" in the recording where the
recording can't rewind/fastforward past the trouble spot and the trouble
spot will cause video to pause, lose sync with the audio, or simply
crash the frontend.

Last time I posted about the errors, somebody said that it was because I
might be running a resource hogging operation like filldatabase or a
compile.  Could simply running a second capture be causing the problems?

I'm getting very frustrated -- I have yet to see the system make it a
week without the backend crashing or 10 programs without the frontend
crashing.


-- 
Adam Felson <a.f.5 at pobox.com>