[mythtv-users] Samba, MythTV, and problems seeking and jumping

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Sat Oct 21 20:37:08 UTC 2006


On 10/21/06 16:11, Micah Zebulon Wedemeyer wrote:

>This has been a long and arduous road, but I think I finally have found 
>some answers.  But first, some history:
>
>For a while now, I have been having trouble with recordings running 
>longer than 30 minutes.  At about the 40 minute mark, I would lose the 
>ability to skip around.  I would hit the jump key or the skip key, and 
>the display would get corrupted (very artifacty) then it would continue, 
>but no skip.  So, I got used to it and it became part of TV watching.
>
...

>Recently, on a whim, I copied a recorded file to the local drive on my 
>frontend.  All this time I had been streaming them over the network 
>(100Mb Ethernet) via a Samba share.  After copying the file locally, 
>then using MPlayer on the local file, it no longer complained about the 
>"cannot seek in linear streams".  So, following this lead, I shut off 
>Samba on the server.  All of a sudden, MythTV could seek in the 
>recordings without a problem.
>
>Now, the weird part: Samba should have nothing to do with the recording 
>and therefore Myth.  I have Samba set up to share the mount point where 
>the backend is storing the recordings, but it is not mounted as an SMB 
>share on the backend.  It's mounted as an LVM, since the drives are 
>physically located in the backend chassis.  So, it puzzles me that Samba 
>would cause any problems for Myth playback.  Myth uses its own scheme to 
>stream files to the frontends, correct?
>
Only if it can't find them locally.  So, when you shut off Samba, it can 
no longer find them locally, so the backend streams the video.  
(Assuming the answer to my first question below is, "Yes.")

>  The MPlayer issues make sense, 
>but not the Myth issues.
>
>So, for now, I have just shut off Samba.  It's not 100% necessary for 
>me, but I'd like to have it running anyway since it's convenient.  Does 
>anyone have any suggestions?  Also, is this worth noting on the wiki?
>
Do you have the backend recordings directory Samba mounted (i.e., mount 
-t smbfs) on the frontend?  If so, that's the issue (because of files > 
2GiB).  Use a CIFS mount, instead (mount -t cifs).  Doing so requires 
the use of http://linux-cifs.samba.org/ (no idea what distros call it).

Mike


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