I went to my master backend last night and tried to watch Live TV on its frontend (the Grammys). I got a black screen for about 30 seconds, then got kicked back to the menu.

I then realized that one of my tuners was recording a show. Once that show was done recording, I could watch Live TV (on that tuner), but trying to bring up picture-in-picture gave nothing but a stuck on-screen menu with no way to exit.

I then realized that one of my recordings from last week was 0 MB, and that it was trying to record on my second tuner due to some show overlap. Luckily The Mrs. had already watched the show and didn't need to watch it via MythTV.

Rebooting the backend got both tuners working again, but my question is, is there a way I can double-check that both tuners are working without sitting down and trying to do picture-in-picture, or trying to record two programs at the same time? Something I could do via SSH would be ideal as I can check it periodically during the week.

Checked mythbackend.log and I'm seeing the "game over, man" error, and just "error reading from: /dev/video1" when I tried to do LiveTV last night.

Master Backend:
-------------------
KnoppMyth R4V5
PVR-250 and PVR-350
Chaintech 7NIF2 motherboard
512MB RAM
Athlon XP 2400+ CPU
160GB HD + 200 GB HD, using LVM for /myth partition

I presume that if you are able to ssh into your MythTV box, and you have done a default install from KnopMyth, then you have not disabled the MythWeb feature of your system.

Caveat: I do not know how you would go about setting up MythWeb on a MythTV box you set up without using KnoppMyth. I am presuming that this is not an issue.

Basically take that seprate system and point a web browser at 'http://mymythboxname/' and you should be presented with a web interface to the current tv schedule. In the light blue banner that begins 'MythTV: Listings | Movies...' you will see a link 'Backend Status'

Select it, and the top box that come up is the status of encoding via your capture cards. If two programs are supposed to be being recorded, and you have two tuners that the system recognizes and uses, it should say something like:



Below that box it should also list the next 10 programs it expects to record, and on which encoder/tuner it expects to record that show. You can use this to see if there is something about to be recorded on multiple tuners.

And of course machine information as well


Another method is to start recording a program on one tuner, exit back to the front end menus, verifiy that it is recording via the recorded programs menu, then go back to the top menu and elect to watch live tv. This should take you to the second tuner.

-Rusty

_________________
Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)

I do check the backend status page regularly (to see if mythfilldatabase has run).

It's never reported that one of my tuners was not working.

I want to see if there is any way of determining if it's working without finding out the hard way (a recording doesn't happen).

So far I will probably just record simultaneous half-hour episodes of something each day; if one tuner doesn't work I can reboot and hope that fixes things.

While watching TV, pressing "Y¨ will switch to your second card.
Probably will not work, since PIP is not working...
Pressing ¨C¨ will toggle between all inputs on the card.

_________________
Tyan Trinity 1854S - VIA Apollo Pro 133
P3-1000, 768mb PC-133, GF2 MX400 64mb
Avermedia M179, ATI TV Wonder w/remote, Maxtor 160 gig, DVD burner.R5E50.
Second FE - Thinkpad T22, 900, 384mb. Ubuntu Dapper, Mythtv FE 0.20

Is there a way you can do a recording from the command line?
If so you could create a script to start a short test recording, then test the file sizes to see if it actually worked. If a problem is discovered you would need to find a way for the machine to let you know, or just reboot itself if that fixes it.

_________________
Paul Turpie
-------------
<--Is your location in your profile? Why not?

I am sure there is a way to do a recording from the command line. A simple 'cat /dev/video0 > file0.mpg& cat /dev/video1 > /file1.mpg&' would work for PVR-x50 cards, though you would have to manually kill the processes yourself.

This does not however test to see if the backend is able to work with the capture cards. For that you could check to see if any shows are being recorded via the web interface, then either manually schedule another show for 'right now', or pick a show that is currently showing as listed in the 'Listings' and demand that be recorded.

Then checking the Status page to see if both shows are being recorded, or even going to the 'Recorded Programs' page to see if it is showing 'Currently Recording' in it's 'Airdate' field would let you know if both tuners are working. You could immediately delete the second recording, even while the recording is in progress.

I do recomend checking the Backend Status page first, this will tell you whether someone is already watching something on a tuner, which may affect how well recording from the other tuner works. Versions of Knoppmyth before R4V5 would use the first available tuner to watch TV, and interupt that if there was a recording that needed to be done. R4V5 (or more correct.y 0.16 of MythTV) now uses the last available tuner to watch live, and only interupts this if all other tuners are already in use for recording.

-Rusty

_________________
Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)