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R5A22, R5A26 Live Video Eventually Blackscreens
http://forum.linhes.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7383		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  strick1226 [ Thu Dec 15, 2005 12:36 pm ]
Post subject:  R5A22, R5A26 Live Video Eventually Blackscreens
Hello, All,

I installed R5A22 as my first experience with KnoppMyth, a day or two after its release. Oops :)
I have a Pentium 3/866 running on an Asus CUSL2-C motherboard (i815 chipset).
2x256MB Crucial PC133 SDRAM
eVGA FX5500 AGP video card...
2x Happauge (sp?) PVR-150 non-MCE...
SB Live! OEM.

My apartment complex manages the cable here--it's a bit odd. I'm unable to obtain any major cable company, such as Time-Warner, etc. Instead, they force a basic DishNetwork satellite package on us as our only option (unless you can fit a satellite dish of your own, but there are WAY too many trees here, so that's not an option for many of us).
Anyway, I have a single incoming coaxial line from the rental office or whatever. Signal quality, even prior to splitting, is not so great...

My biggest issue with MythTV has been a loss of live video at some point or another over a few days. The machine doesn't crash--it simply goes to a black screen, rather than display live video, or respond to keyboard/remote commands--for MythTV, at least.
I actually can hit alt-x to get to a command prompt and look around. I've figured out the need to reduce the cache buffer to the actual size of the cache partition -1GB, and that seems to have helped, to some degree... but it's still happening on occasion, and my wife is very upset by this.
Any ideas on what I can try to see/examine to find out what is causing the issue? I love MythTV other than this!!!

I'm currently running R5A26. I did *not* upgrade from 22, but reloaded onto a new hard drive altogether.
I've also tried swapping out RAM and reducing the total # tuners to one at a time... no fix.

Thanks in advance for any insight!
Author:  strick1226 [ Thu Jan 05, 2006 5:09 am ]
Post subject: 
OK, an update...

I replaced the ASUS CUSL2-C motherboard running the P3 with a Abit IC7-G running a 2.2 GHz P4 w/2x 256MB PC3200 GEIL DDR.

I also replaced the power supply.

Things looked good for a while (about a week?) but I woke up to find it sitting at a black screen again early this morning.

Now, if I leave the MythTV box at the main MythTV GUI, then this doesn't seem to happen--even if it's recording up to two programs in the background.

This issue appears to occur only when the livetv is running, and I'm actually watching one of the tuners onscreen.

I've also never had it do this while watching a recorded program, even several hours of them at a time.

Is it the PVR-150 cards? Should I give up and buy PVR-250's instead? Do those come with remotes?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Author:  mad_paddler [ Thu Jan 05, 2006 5:58 am ]
Post subject: 
Since this only happens in live TV it surely has to be something to do with the cache? I am sure it is advised to set the cache size slightly lower than what is actually available, you could try setting it to 0.9 if thats possible?
Author:  strick1226 [ Thu Jan 05, 2006 7:06 am ]
Post subject: 
Hi, mad_paddler,

Yes, I've already adjusted it, as I noticed the KnoppMyth Auto-install caused it to create a larger cache in MythTV than the partition actually could handle.

You're recommending going to less than 1GB for the cache, then? I'll try it out.

Thanks for your reply!


strick1226
Author:  mad_paddler [ Thu Jan 05, 2006 8:16 am ]
Post subject: 
If that still doesn't work, you might get more info if you launch mythbackend & mythfrontend each from their own terminal (kill both of them first)

then you can alt-tab after a lockup and see if there were any helpful error messages.
Author:  strick1226 [ Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:58 am ]
Post subject: 
mad_paddler,

Cool, nice tip! Will try that out tonight.

Thanks again for your help!


strick1226
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