Playing a video in MythVideo locks the frontend, and mplayer never opens.
I can see the process in another console, but can't kill it.

I tried to go into video settings, but that either crashes the frontend or locks the machine. DVD settings does the same thing. Watching the console, the front end process is eventually killed because it runs out of memory. I have to restart the backend process as well to get things running again.

This is on my backend system. on a front end machine, mythvideo works fine.

I'd like to try reseting the config data for the video player and dvd player, but can't get there from the gui.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I was able to access the settings pages by switching to another theme.

After some trial and error, I found that adding -ao oss to my mplayer command line fixed the hang.

I am still unable to kill the hung mplayer processes, even with -9, but at least its working.

You haven't provided enough information about this problem.

What type of 'video' was it? DVD? .mpg? .avi? Sounds like you're trying to play a DVD(?)

What Hardware do you have? You should have your hardware and KM version in your signature: Makes things a lot easier.

To debug, quit mythfrontend, start an xterm (alt+x) and start mythfrontend from here (just type "mythfrontend" then hit enter). Do what you do to reproduce the problem, then when it's hung, alt+tab gets you to the terminal. In the terminal you can ctrl+c to kill mythfrontend. If it doesn't die from here, chances are you're trying to play a DVD, since ctrl+c really only fails when it's a hardware problem. If it quits, read the terminal output. The messages above the ctrl+c message ("received sigterm" or some such) normally tell you what the problem was.

It's not necessary to do all this if the problem is frequent: The file /home/mythtv/.xsession-errors contains mythfrontend errors.

Incidentally, mythvideo doesn't use mplayer as the default. You could try using the default player ("Internal" - note the capitalisation). There isn't much it can't handle. That's just for videos, though, it doesn't (in my experience) play DVDs all that well. For DVDs, I use xine, with "xine -V xv -pfqh %s" as the DVD play setting. Manually starting xine means replacing %s with dvd:/ (single slash).

If it is only DVDs and xine hangs too (I've never seen xine hang) your DVD player could well be buggered. Also, have you installed the library to read DVDs (referred to cryptically as "the pineapple")? KM can't read commercially produced DVDs out of the box.
Do you know what device your DVD is? Mine is /dev/hdc so to look for the process that's locking it, "lsof|grep hdc" will do it. You can kill the parent process as root when you know its pid (process ID number).

Cheers

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Thanks for the troubleshooting suggestions.

The problem appears solved, but for future reference...
I haven't tried to get the DVD module going yet. Just got around to the video module. The video in question was xvid/mp3 in an avi container, located on a naslite2 NFS store. Myth was using mplayer for AVI files. I don't know if thats a default or was carried over from the upgrade. The problem was repeatable from a command line. The settings page hangs were in bluetube-wide.

Running mplayer from the console appeared normal, but the video window never opened and the process hung.

I tried mplayer with the -nosound option, and the video played, without sound. my default sound device in myth is /dev/dsp. i found that -ao oss allowed the video to play with sound, no hang.

Now i had to get that setting back into myth. I could see the settings table contents in the mysql widget in webmin, but I don't know enough to run an update query against the table from a shell and webmin won't allow edits because the table is not indexed.

As a shot in the dark, I changed the theme to titivillus and it let me back in to the video settings. Once I modified the player command line things started working. I'll go back and try Internal as a default when I get some downtime. If theres anything else to be learned from this let me know, it was definitely repeatable.

Here are my backend specs.

KM version: R5E50
AMD 2400+
K7S5A Pro rev 5.0
1GB Ram
1 NVIDIA FX5200
1 Fusion HD 5 ATSC - OTA
1 PVR250 - digital cable
1 PVR150 - digital cable
1 maxtor SATA controller
80g IDE boot disk on hda
/myth on a 1.5 TB LVM:
2x 500g SATA + 1x 500g IDE (hdc)