I've just done a new install of r4 and have a problem. Everything but live tv seems to work. I can schedule a recording, and if I copy the file into /myth/video I can play it, but if I try live tv or to play the recording from the tv module, the frontend exits (live tv also exits the backend, I assuming because the frontend is gone, log shows 'Unable to write to client socket, as it's no longer there). Mp3, DVD, and video playback are fine, the recordings have the right shows etc. Any ideas? No console messages by the way.

Hardware:
ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe
2600+ XP
NVidia FX5200
WinTV PVR 250

Sounds like the backend is crashing...Have you checked the log? /var/log/mythtv

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

The backend only exits if I go into live tv, the frontend also goes in this case.

The frondend also exits if I select a recording in the tv module, but the backend stays running. If I copy the file from /tv to /video I can play it.

For the record the log shows:
'Unable to write to client socket, as it's no longer there'

I'm thinking the backend only goes down as its trying to feed video to the frontend which crashed first, but I'll try just about anything at this point.

There isn't anything in the log from the frontend, or in /var/log/messages, or on the console.

What output do you get when you run mythfrontend from an xterm? Have you search the mythtv archive?

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

did you happen to use the install-i686-lx script? if so try reverting back to not using xvmc support as it is very buggy in 0.12. It is much better in 0.13

Runing the frontend from the xterm I get:

Unable to create XvMC Context
Segmentation fault

I thought that the nvidia cards supported XvMC, but is there an easy way to switch XvMC off without re-installing?

nvidia does support xvmc, but mythtv 0.12 was the first version to include support and it was VERY buggy. 0.13 works fine with xvmc and nvidia.

Hmm I did this back when I was running 0.12 and having the crashes, but if I remember correctly I had some problems with the scripts. you can just go to a root console and do install-i686-l

I think if I remember correctly that will give you some errors about packages that already exist, and you go remove the ones that are installed now and rerun the script.

Once agian this is just from memory but I think you have to uninstall mythtv-lirc-xvmc then run the script.

Ok, ran install-i686-lirc after removing the package it complains about.
Re-did the mythtv-setup and filldatabase.

I can now play the files recorded earlier (yea!).

However, I can't capture anything now.
The log shows I/O errors on /dev/video and frontend freezes up.
The console shows:
ivtv: startcat error 1. Code -16
ivtv: Timeout waiting for data! (repeatedly until I kill both ends).

sounds like you're having ivtv problems. have you rebooted? none of the stuff you did should have affected the ivtv drivers unless I'm missing something.

Yup, that did it. The ivtv driver module needed to be reloaded.

Thanks for your help guys.

Ok, I spoke too soon. Everything now works, but the machine lockups hard after capturing for a while. No response to Ctrl-Alt-Del, the console etc. (I have to reset). It does this while I'm monitoring the capture in the console. The longest recording I've been able to make is 30 min. The others were around 13 mins.

Any ideas?

do you happen to have an nforce2 based motherboard?

doh just looked at your origional post and indeed you do. And an Asus to boot. The asus nforce2 motherboards seem to have a problem with local apic. Unfortunately the only way to disble this is with a kernel recompile. You can search the boards this has been discused MANY times, and I think there are even some howto's on compiling the kernel for this.

Hopefully there will be some sort of solution for this in R5, but I'm not sure what that would be at this point, unless they moved to the 2.6 kernel.

Yes, its an nForce2. To be specific, its an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe. According to the Asus web site it using nVidia nForce2-ST.

see edited post above.

Joy, that sounds fun. I started reading some of those threads, but they still seemed to be able to get to the console so I wan't sure I needed that. Thanks for the help.