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PostPosted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 1:37 pm 
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Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2006 3:05 pm
Posts: 252
Location: GA, USA
I searched the forum and found the last time I asked this question was in 2009--nearly 11 years ago! After keeping my MythBox in storage for 3 years and moving from 50 channels to 300 channels, my box is no longer reliable. I had hoped it would be able to keep up while I decide whether to stick with Myth or learn to use the small Xfinity cloud DVR, but it's just not working. Since re-starting using Myth, the backend continues to stop responding with no noticeable errors in the log. I wind up restarting it--and often losing hours of recordings that didn't happen--every few days. Today I noticed it's still comflagging shows recorded 2 days ago, at a rate of 2.8 frames/sec. I can't figure out if the hardware is failing or the recorded streams are more difficult for the machine to process than they were in 2016 when I last used the system.

Anyway, the 3-tier hardware forums are kind of thin on recent recommendations. Should I just shoot for the moon and get the best CPU/RAM/Video Card my budget allows? Is there a video card that's better or worse with Myth these days? It seems like over the years I avoided Nvidia then later switched over to Nvidia, but I haven't been able to find any specific video recommendations.

On a related note, if I want to re-use the current install drive as a storage drive, can I just delete everything but the /myth directory on it and then add it with the add_storage.py --no_destruction command like I plan to with the other storage drives? It seems like that must work, but I want to be sure before I erase anything.

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LinHES R8.6 BE/FE GIGABYTE GA-X48-DS5 / EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ / 4GB DDR2 RAM


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 8:41 pm 
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Mine is probably not much newer than yours, but I find it has plenty of horsepower for my needs. I have a pc with an AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 270 Processor and an NVIDIA GT 710 video card. The video card provides video and audio over hdmi and the motherboard has an ethernet connection. It has come a long way from when I needed a separate tv tuner pci card, network card, audio card, serial port, and video card. I use hdhomerun for the networked tuner so there is not much plugged into the mobo. The biggest thing is probably not getting bleeding edge hardware that may not be supported yet.

FYI, Kodi long ago announced ending support for vdpau, which has long been the most supported decoder for mythtv in my view. Nvidia has a new decoder called NVDEC, but support has lagged with it. It is supposed to be supported in mythtv 31, but it seems that nvidia will eventually not be the preferred video card in linux anymore (I am not sure what will, though)


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 13, 2020 7:54 am 
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Location: GA, USA
That's what has me wondering about hardware failure. When I first fired up my LinHES box, it seemed to be operating normally, finishing commercial flagging within a short time after the program. Now that it's running so slowly, I figure there's got to be something wrong. It's not at the top of my priorities right now, so I haven't been able to sit down and read logs line by line to see if I can figure out what's up with it.

EDIT: After a reboot, it's back to commflagging at ~90fps. Curiouser and curiouser.

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PostPosted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 11:35 am 
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Location: GA, USA
Ok, back to thinking of upgrading it. The system has seemed essentially stable ever since I posted about upgrading it. Then last night while watching a movie, my wife noticed a beeping that was not in the video. The Myth box was beeping, which is never a good sign. I looked at the status and saw it was recording two shows while commflagging a third at the same time I was watching a 720p show on Kodi. The load was something like 4.00, and the 4GB memory was about maxed out. Part of me wants to upgrade each component one by one to see if I can solve it that way, while the other part wants to just build a new machine, get its kinks worked out, and then replace the old box with it.

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PostPosted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 2:10 pm 
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Joined: Wed Jan 04, 2006 10:20 am
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Location: South New Jersey, USA
What CPU and Video card do you have in the current system? Knowing that would make it easier to recommend keeping or trashing it.

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote


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PostPosted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 3:56 pm 
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Location: GA, USA
Big boy stan wrote:
What CPU and Video card do you have in the current system? Knowing that would make it easier to recommend keeping or trashing it.

Fortunately Newegg keeps order histories forever ;-)

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Yorkfield Quad-Core 2.83 GHz LGA 775 95W BX80569Q9550 Desktop Processor
EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ DirectX 10 512-P3-N871-AR 512MB 256-Bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready

I did a quick search and it looks like I can go with a 3.33 GHz processor and up to 8GB RAM with the current motherboard, GIGABYTE GA-X48-DS5 LGA 775 Intel X48 ATX Intel Motherboard

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PostPosted: Thu Jan 16, 2020 2:47 pm 
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Location: South New Jersey, USA
My current system is very similar to yours. My guess is you have more than enough horsepower. If anything, adding ram is a cheap and easy upgrade that may improve a few things. Not sure it will help with lockups though.

Are there any flashing lights on the Health and Maintenance Web page? Maybe HDD temp or SMART?

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 17, 2020 8:42 am 
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Location: GA, USA
It happened again last night, and I ran straight to my desktop to check the status. Everything was green except for the orphan which is yellow for 3 old backup files. Nothing else seemed off. The load was 2.35 because it was recording a program while commflagging another and playing a movie on Kodi. I'm going to try opening up the case and re-applying thermal paste to the CPU. Seems like I do that every few years, and it certainly wasn't done while the box was in storage for 3 years.

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 17, 2020 11:40 am 
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DoomedTX wrote:
...the backend continues to stop responding...it's still comflagging shows recorded 2 days ago...


If you're in the frontend, does it keep displaying messages about not being able to connect to the backend?

This sounds similar to an issue I've been having, and is being discussed on forum.mythtv.org.

https://forum.mythtv.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=3545

Yes, that's discussing metadata lookup jobs, but I suspect they may be related.

I'm not using LinHES (but MythTV on Xubuntu) so if other people are having similar problems, it may not be your hardware.

What I've done for now is update all my recording rules to not queue metadata lookup jobs (leaving only commflag jobs to be processed,) and in setup configured job processing to only run one job at a time at low cpu use. Just to test those settings for a while and see if the problem stops.

Check existing jobs in information center, and delete or requeue as desired.

As I said, I'm not on LinHES so I hope the interface is still the same as what I described.

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Not using LinHES because 8.6 didn't support my hardware, but still very interested in future developments, so lurking once in a while. :)


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PostPosted: Sun Feb 02, 2020 8:00 am 
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Location: GA, USA
@wesmorrison, thanks for the insights. I haven't noticed any FE errors, but the BE continues to fall behind in commflagging. Currently it's Sunday, and it's flagging shows from Thursday. I noticed that the last job prior to the current one was a metadata lookup that failed with status 140 on Thursday. Following your suggestion, I'm now removing metadata lookup from all my recording rules. I'm hoping this clears up the backlog of commflagging jobs.

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LinHES R8.6 BE/FE GIGABYTE GA-X48-DS5 / EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ / 4GB DDR2 RAM


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 07, 2020 5:57 am 
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Location: GA, USA
Updating in case it helps anyone else, namely myself in 5 years when I have trouble again.

The system has been more-or-less stable since its last reboot on Jan 13. However, I noticed the load always hangs out at a minimum of 1.0, where it's usually much less than that. I kept assuming it was commflagging or processing mythfilldatabase data, but today I caught it at a high load while not doing any of those things. The top CPU user was "loading.sh," which I think is the script used to play trailers. No trailers were playing nor have they been for weeks. I restarted the frontend, there's no more loading.sh process running, and now my loads are back in the 0.15 range. I still need to open the case, clean out the dust bunnies, and re-apply thermal paste, but it keeps not being a high enough priority with the rest of life going on. It's taken more than a month, but I think we're finally returning to using Myth as our primary TV watching instead of clicking through channels on the cable box.

Still thinking about upgrading, especially now that my oldest has recently asked to learn about building computers. Aww, I have to buy a new system to show him how to put one together? Shucks! It just seems the MythTV userbase is shrinking, making it more difficult to find recent recommendations for components that are likely to work out of the box.

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