[mythtv-users] Solution: frontend crash on playback
Hey all, My appollogies if this has already been covered, but I just worked around a nasty hangup and I'm pretty excited about it, so I thought I'd share in case anyone else is where I was for about the last 4 days. Symptom: Mythfrontend would crash at the start of playback if I selected a recording for a second time (play, back to menu, play again, boom). Changing whether the position was saved on exit didn't help. If I selected one video and then another, it would work, but it would eventually crash when it started to play about the 4th or 5th recording. It would also crash at other times and was unstable in general, but the times I just mentioned were very predicatble. My backend was also very unstable. There was nothing unusal in mythfrontend's output except "Killed" at the end. What especially perplexed me was that I didn't change the configuration at all when the instability developed. It was solid for the first 5 or so days after I set it up. System: AMD Athlon XP 2400, NForce2 Motherboard, 2x Hauppauge 250, Samsung 160GB HD MythTV .016, Gentoo with vanilla 2.6.9 kernel, NVidia Drivers 1.0.6629 Solution: After a few days of dead ends (I thought the HD was dying, but cloning it to another drive made no difference - hell 320GB once I get LVM working:) I found help with this list post: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/96713?search_string=%2Fdev%2Fdri%2Fcard0;#96713 I never realized mythfrontend's --verbose option took arguments. # mythfrontend --verbose playback --- SNIP --- 2004-12-29 23:06:58 Changing from None to WatchingPreRecorded 2004-12-29 23:06:58 nVidiaVideoSync: VBlank ioctl did not work, unimplemented in this driver? 2004-12-29 23:06:58 DRMVideoSync: Could not open device /dev/dri/card0, No such file or directory Killed Exactly the output in the post. Apparently the problem is with OpenGL vsync and NVidia drivers. Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned that you can disable OpenGL VSYNC in Myth by commenting out the OpenGL VSYNC block in the settings.pro file in the Myth source directory and recompiling from scratch settings.pro: # OpenGL support for vertical retrace sync #DEFINES += USING_OPENGL_VSYNC #EXTRA_LIBS += -lGL -lGLU #CONFIG += using_opengl shell: make clean distclean && ./configure && make && make install Now that I'm looking around I little more I see that for Gentooers, adding "-opengl" to your use flags and re-emerging MythTV will accomplish the same thing with less keyboard on your hands. Also, I don't know if it's necessary to comment-out the "EXTRA_LIBS" and "unsing_opengl" lines too. I'm guessing it's not, but I don't want to experiment with it just yet. This has completely cleared up the problem for me, and even the backend instability has gone away. I've been abusing it for about an hour and a half (starting playback, stopping, rewinding, Live TV, recording, program guide, aggressive editing of recording schedules), and everything looks great. I am STOKED! I suppose I'm not using OpenGL anymore, but this is a fast system with hardware encoding, so I have a few cycles to spare, and I don't feel like worrying about it right now. I've got time-shifted Aquateens to watch once I finish this email. But first... My Uneducated Theory: Backtrace on the same crash shows that it's crashing inside the OpenGL library provided by NVidia Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. [Switching to Thread 196616 (LWP 1055)] 0xb64ec226 in _nv000833gl () from /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1 (gdb) bt #0 0xb64ec226 in _nv000833gl () from /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1 #1 0xb73d4210 in _nv30gl () from /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 #2 0x00030008 in ?? () #3 0x041f in ?? () #4 0xb7f2dda8 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libmythtv-0.16.so.0 (gdb) kill If it's crashing because it can't open /dev/dri/card0, thien it makes sense, because there's no such file in my /dev filesystem. Now, I'm not particularly familiar with udev, but from what I understand that kind of heirarchical /dev structure is a udev thing. So maybe the whole problem is that NVidia's OpenGL is expecting a system that's running 2.6 to be running udev and have a /dev/dri/card0, but Gentoo hasn't graduated to udev yet, so there is none. Somebody let me know if I'm on the right track here. Oh hell yes it's a Moononites episode! Good Luck Everybody, Mike ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Recommendations
nate s wrote: What distribution are you using? I'm thinking either Fedora Core or Mandrake (I love gentoo, but I think it may be too much for this)... --Dennis Gentoo too much? How so? I've got it running fine on gentoo. I hear FC is one of the easiest to set up due to Jarod's guide, and I've also heard good things about KnoppMyth, esp. for a first time setup. However, if you're already a gentoo user, I'd highly recommned that, as in my slightly biased opinion, the setup on gentoo is even easier (gentoo setup in general is hard, but if you're familar with that, the mythtv setup part is pretty painless.) -Nate I agree, I did Knoppmyth first, but when I tried to upgrade to Myth version 0.16 I had a hard time finding Debian packages. The box was having other problems too, so I scrapped it tried Gentoo and I loved it. Yes the installation was a lot more involved, but I learned a hell of a lot more about Myth and about Linux in general from going through it. Now that I know the box inside and out, I'm much better at troubleshooting when things go wrong. Also I imagine my next upgrade will be easier since Gentoo will probably be the first distro with Myth packages, and if they don't, it should still be one of the easiest to install from the source tarballs. A friend of mine who runs Knoppmyth said he hit a lot of problems trying to do a manual compile upgrade because Knoppmyth moves a lot of things like libraries to non-default locations and he had to move them back. So if you feel like taking the time and learning a lot, I would recommend Gentoo. There are also some excellent Gentoo-specific guides out there too, check out: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_MythTV http://home.comcast.net/~alf_park/mythtv.html Good Luck, Mike ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] Error getting encoder firmware version
How did you go about installing the IVTV drivers? The Hauppauge PVR cards expect the drivers to load firmware onto them the cards when they start up. The binaries for this firmware need to be present on your filesystem (in /lib/modules/ if i recall correctly), but they aren't distributed with the IVTV drivers because they're not open-source. You probably won't have these binaries unless you installed with Knoppmyth or something. It sounds like that may be your problem. The IVTV drivers include a utility called ivfwextract that can pull the binaries you need out of a downloaded copy of the windows drivers. There's a step-by-step on the gentoo wiki's myth howto: http://gentoo-wiki.com/index.php?title=HOWTO_Setup_MythTV#ivtv No offense if you already know about it. It's definitely something I stumbled over. Good luck, Mike a_tall_guy 2001 wrote: Hi All - I have been at this several weeks now and am running out of ideas. I am trying to get any version of the ivtv drivers to load, and am getting an error : Kernel: Error -16 getting firmware version. I can see the board through lspci - __ :00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC15 MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01) Subsystem: Hauppauge computer works Inc. WinTV PVR-350 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 17 Memory at dc00 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2 ___ ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] possible frontend hardware?
If you are going to get an Xbox, definitely get used/refurbished one. You'll pay less and you'll have a much better chance of getting an older unit. If you have an older Xbox (manufactured before May 2004 or so), there are loopholes that allow you to install linux with no mod chip. Newer boxes have those holes patched, so you'll have to kick in the extra 50 US$ to get a mod chip, and you' have to do more soldering. Check the serial number through the window in the cardboard before you pull out the credit card: http://www.xbox-linux.org/Version_1.6_Warning http://www.xbox-linux.org/Xbox_Versions_HOWTO Now that I'm doing more research, the shiny new myth frontend that I got for Christmas isn't looking so hot. Dad I know you read this list too... did you keep the reciept? haha -Mike nate s wrote: less than $150, that's what they cost new now. You can get them used at a game store for like $120 or $130, ebay should be less, but often isn't. -Nate On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 12:20:32 -0500, Dave <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Just to be clear, the MediaMVP's current functionality is playing recorded programs, it is *not* a full fledged frontend (scheduling, music, photos, etc) at the moment. The cheapest fully funcitonal frontend I've seen is an XBox (Ebay for $150?) Dave ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
