Michael T. Dean wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Now that my Myth box seems to be fairly stable, I'm slowly starting to
migrate recording shows off the Tivo and onto the Myth box. As I'm
actually using Myth a lot more, I've noticed a few problems...
1) When I select a recorded show to play from the menu, on about 20% of
them, the screen goes black and there is no sound, it sits there like
this
for anything from 10-45 seconds and then the show starts and plays as
normal...
I've run the database check and it's all fine and playing the files
over a
samba share is OK too. Playing videos in MythVideo has no problems...
This is most likely swapping all the "unnecessary" stuff out of
buffers/cache and swapping the playback code back into memory.
Basically, Myth is a long-running process and the most-used parts of
it are not the TV-watching parts, but the recording, commflagging,
transcoding, etc. So, when you haven't watched TV for 20 hours, the
system has to make all that "infrequently-used" code available. You
can affect the delay by setting kernel options for "swapiness,"
buffering/caching, ... (How to do so is left as an exercise to the
reader. ;) Do a Google search to see just how much discussion exists
on the right way to tune your system (and read them all since they all
tend to disagree).) For example, I travel a lot for work, and when
returning from a one-week trip, it can take so long to load the code
for playing back a recording that Myth gives up and tells me I
finished watching the recording and asks if I'd like to delete it. I
just say no and try playing a second time and it begins playing
instantly. On a more typical once-a-day playback (i.e. haven't watch
TV for almost 24 hours), I'll get a more reasonable delay like the
ones you mentioned above.
That isn't it, I watched several shows, in a row and then it happened
again.... :(
Should it be swapping stuff out? There are something like 480MB of free RAM?
If this is happening multiple times in a single TV-watching session,
it may be caused by an I/O wait situation. For example, if you delete
a recording, and then attempt to play back another recording, you
might get stuck waiting for the disk to finish the delete before it
provides any new data (i.e. the next recording) for playback. This is
especially noticeable using a filesystem that is not known for fast
deletes of large files, i.e. ext3. Even with other filesystems, it
may cause some delay.
No deleting going on, I hit the 'Back' button before the end of the
shows...
Any more possible solutions?
2) Scrolling up and down the recorded shows menu, occasionally pauses
for
a few seconds, with what sounds like harddrive thrashing about, before
continuing as normal, this is a minor problem, but it's SOOOOOO
annoying...
The first time you scroll past a show, Myth creates a thumbnail image
of that show. (And, I think with Risto Treksler's new "preview image
honors commflag/cutlist" stuff in recent versions, if you create a
thumbnail by scrolling over a show before commflagging finishes, it
will create a new thumbnail the first time you scroll over the show
after it has been flagged.) This is causing the delay.
Now you've got something there... After I'd been slowly down the whole
list, it didn't do it any more...
Is there any way to automatically create a thumbnail without comm
flagging? It's just that a lot of my stuff is recorded from channels
that don't have adverts, so no need for comm flagging...
3) When using the 30 second skip, it skips and then kind of does slow
motion for about 1 sec or 2 and then plays properly. Is this normal?
or is
there a problem? It's annoying after using the 30sec skip on the Tivo
for
years...
Never seen this, so if it is normal, my system isn't. :) It sounds
like a problem with your sound settings. For example, make sure you
don't enable, "Aggressive Sound card Buffering."
Aggressive sound card buffering was off already... Anything else to look at?
Thanks again,
Lee
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