After upgrading to R5A16 and finding a posting by Red5 which described how to get the pcHDTV card set up (earlier attempts using other instructions failed), I finally have a system that records from the HD-3000, plays back in HD, and plays DVDs.

Whoops - I *had* a system that plays DVDs. For some unknown reason, now when I try to play a DVD, the kernel.log fills up with I/O errors.

The only thing I'm aware of changing in that area was to check the box in the setup which claims to automatically play media when it's inserted. I've since unchecked the box, rebooted, etc. with no success.

Due to all the issues I've encountered with upgrading, my system is a dual boot with R5A12 on a different partition. When I boot that, I can play the DVD fine, which tells me it's not a hardware issue.

I searched the forum for 'dvd' 'error' and saw nothing similar to this, so if it's been encountered before, clues to locating the answer would be appreciated! Someone mentioned I/O errors on DVD in conjunction with simultaneously recording from the tuner, but that's not the case here.

Thanks,

Charles Green

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Abit IS-10, P4-2.8 GHz / HT / 800MB FSB
2GB DDR400 dual-channel RAM
nVidia FX 5200 8X AGP
pcHDTV HD-3000
Samsung Spinpoint 160GB SATA
Antec Aria case, Zalman 7000-Cu heatsink
Samsung TS-H552U DVD drive
Akai (Samsung) 848x480 Plasma EDTV

Scratched DVD, bad drive, etc.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Cesman,

Thanks for the reply. Can you help me understand why I'm able to play these DVDs on this drive when I reboot using my R5A12 image?

With further testing, I've discovered that I have *one* (so far) DVD which plays under R5A16 with no problems. (Fortunately, it's my 20-month-old's favorite.) Happens to be a single-layer. After trying out several discs, I've found another single-layer DVD which, when attempting to play, produces errors but returns to the MythTV screen after a few seconds. I can then insert the first DVD and it will play.

All other prerecorded DVDs I've tried, including all dual-layer ones, go into an apparently continuous error mode, spewing to kern.log, syslog and messages with what I agree looks like a drive or media problem; the MythTV menu is wedged (no highlighted selection, can't move or exit) and the root filesystem will eventually fill up if not rebooted:

Again, these DVDs all play fine when I reboot into R5A12.

For what it's worth, here are all the lines I could find for 'DVD', 'CD' and 'hdc' in 'dmesg':

The only difference I see in the R5A12 logging is the string "UDMA(33)" is missing.

Thanks again,

Charles Green

_________________
--
Abit IS-10, P4-2.8 GHz / HT / 800MB FSB
2GB DDR400 dual-channel RAM
nVidia FX 5200 8X AGP
pcHDTV HD-3000
Samsung Spinpoint 160GB SATA
Antec Aria case, Zalman 7000-Cu heatsink
Samsung TS-H552U DVD drive
Akai (Samsung) 848x480 Plasma EDTV

Charles: this is really obvious, but have you installed the proper libraries to allow you to watch encrypted DVDs on your R5A16 install? Maybe the one DVD that played back was actually unencrypted (some don't bother encrypting discs anymore since it's trivially broken and it costs money to encrypt).

Ceenvee,

So obvious that I'd installed the libraries after putting together my R5A12 system and seeing the informative error message come out of 'mplayer', but not so obvious that I remembered to do it when building the R5A15 partition - thanks! (Though I don't remember seeing I/O errors in the disk-busting logs before, maybe that's what deceived me.)

Now on to figure out how to get the widescreen ModeLine which works great in R5A12's 'nv' driver (or something close) to work with R5A15 / 'nvidia', get the nice big fonts from R5A12 on my R5A15 system, how to get the DVI output of the nVidia card to work with the DVI input on my TV, etc...

Thanks again!

-Charles

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--
Abit IS-10, P4-2.8 GHz / HT / 800MB FSB
2GB DDR400 dual-channel RAM
nVidia FX 5200 8X AGP
pcHDTV HD-3000
Samsung Spinpoint 160GB SATA
Antec Aria case, Zalman 7000-Cu heatsink
Samsung TS-H552U DVD drive
Akai (Samsung) 848x480 Plasma EDTV