[mythtv-users] Computer hangs with "Please wait..." when playing recordings or watching TV

[Raymond Wagner]

On 12/18/2013 1:10 PM, Rich West wrote:
> On 12/18/2013 03:19 PM, Raymond Wagner wrote:
>> On Dec 18, 2013, at 12:03, Rich West <Rich.West at wesmo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> If you get in via SSH, can you do a "pkill -9 mythfrontend"? (-TERM may
>>> or may not work, -9 is like yanking the carpet out from underneath it)
>> Don't use -9.  Unless your using some special code specific to you particular POSIX blend, always use the aliased terms.  Specifically, you want -KILL.
> As with nearly all systems out there, there are multiple ways to do the
> same thing.  -KILL is mapped to -9 on most unix variants.  Basic rule of
> thumb: use whatever works understanding the consequences of what is
> being done.  YMMV, of course.
>
> Personally, I avoid the obfuscation of aliases.  However, my meager
> recommendation is to send -TERM (aka -15 on most unix systems) first to
> see if the program will exit nicely before taking out the shotgun and
> really killing it off.

The issue is that -TERM and -KILL and other standard aliases will always 
do what you want.  They may not always be mapped to the same numeric 
code.  It's the same concept behind using preprocessor defines, rather 
than using their explicit value.

> However, back to the original topic.. I've seen a higher frequency of
> the "Please Wait..." on the front end systems (it's actually kind of
> nice to have that, vs the blank screen in the past.. there was a period
> where I swore I was getting a countdown image at one point).  Since
> 0.25, I started getting a 15 second delay between selecting a recording
> and when it started playing.  I haven't clocked it since I just rebuilt
> my backend with newer (not new, just newER) hardware.

The "countdown" screen is part of the theme you are using, although I 
don't recall ever seeing it animated.  I believe it was just a static 
image.  If recordings are taking a long time to open, do you have any 
network filesystems mounted mythfrontend may be searching through, 
trying to find the file?  Is it possible the drives storing the 
recordings have parked or spun down due to idleness, and needed to be 
started up before you can access them?  Mythfrontend needs to open a new 
connection to the backend to stream the file through.  Is it possible 
there is something flaky with your network that delays this process?