I have a knoppmyth system that has been up and running fine for over a year.
My capture card is a Hauppauge 250. I've changed nothing I can think of, but recently the machine is acting very quirky. A restart used to fix it. Now I can't watch live TV. I'm starting to suspect my capture card or motherboard is toast. I have bttv loading ok by checking dmesg. Any thoughts on what's going wrong here? Or anything I should try? When I try and watch live TV or a recent recording the below appears in my mythbackend.log:

2006-11-10 16:49:07.967 Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV
2006-11-10 16:49:07.990 Unknown video codec
2006-11-10 16:49:07.992 Please go into the TV Settings, Recording Profiles and
2006-11-10 16:49:07.995 setup the four 'Software Encoders' profiles.
2006-11-10 16:49:07.999 Assuming RTjpeg for now.
2006-11-10 16:49:08.003 NVR: Error, unknown audio codec
2006-11-10 16:49:08.008 NVR: Error, cannot open DSP ''
open: No such file or directory
2006-11-10 16:49:08.015 NVR: Could not detect audio blocksize
2006-11-10 16:49:08.020 Channel()::Open(): Can't open video device, error "No such file or directory"

btw, the 4 software encoders profiles seem to be there.

Are you able to record shows? I would start by running mythtv-setup from an Xterm and see if the settings are still OK - Perhaps a corrupt table in your database?

What was "fixed" by the restart (same errors you are seeing now, something different), and what kind of restart was it? Reboot, coldboot, restart gdm, etc..

Sorry, I forgot to mention for the last week it records programs with zero length. If I try and watch one, it just goes black screen. Sometimes I can ctrl-alt-backspace, and restart X. Other times, I ssh in from another machine and reboot the myth box. I did poke around in mythtv-setup and it all looked ok to me. I have run myisamchk -vfr on my mythconverg *.MYI tables. I've had corrupt tables from time to time that have created similar problems. But now they all seem ok. I wouldn't mind starting fresh, but I don't want to lose all my recordings either. Does anyone have a link to a howto for transfering them to another machine? I'm on an older version of Knoppmyth, I think maybe .15? Is there a quick command to know which version I'm on?

BTW - It definitely sounds like you've got a corrupted DB. Is your box protected by a UPS? Do you have a problem where people turn the machine off without doing a clean shutdown? Does it crash for other reasons?

Silly question maybe, but have you run any of your filesystems out of space? Perhaps you don't have room to record anything, or for logging, etc...

Thanks! I've found out I was running Knoppmyth R5 Alpha 26.
My root file system is getting close to full, but I don't think to the point I should be seeing problems yet. Here's the output of df -h
/dev/hda1 3.3G 3.1G 104M 97% /
/dev/hda3 8.0G 1.2M 8.0G 1% /cache
/dev/hda4 101G 73G 28G 73% /myth

I've got this box on a UPS and no one can spontaneously restart it. The frontend has crashed now and then, but I can't remember the entire machine locking up and when I am forced to restart it I ssh in and issue the reboot command. However, a few months back, when I was first having this issue, I would issue the command:

myisamchk -vfr /var/lib/mysql/mythconverg/*.MYI

to fix any corrupt tables. Normally when doing that, I would shut down the mysql server. I think I have forgotten to shut it off and done it too. But now, when I run the above command with the mysql server down it's not finding any problems and when I restart the mysql server (or the entire pc) it still records zero length recordings and when I attempt to either watch a recording or live TV I get the black screen which requires me restarting X or lately issuing a reboot command by ssh'ing in from another machine.

Can I get deeper diagnostic info from mysql using the analyze command? If so, which tables should I be looking at most likely? Or does anyone know of a better way to check for the problem tables?

I suspect that the problem is that the recording profiles table lost it's contents and needs to be recreated. You're probably due for an upgrade to a more recent version too.

What I might suggest is to do the backup, but hide it from the db dump from the restore script and then only put back the contents of the tables related to your recordings. The "how to take advantage of the new backup and restore scripts" sticky posting under hints & tips contains a long discussion of this.

got me beat a bit...

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA