I have a 10 gig space for the ringbuffer.

When I pause my live-TV, let 4 hours pass, come back, unpause. It will either play for 1 seconds, pause for 1 second, play for one second... etc in that fasion, OR it will play fine but as soon as I skip ahead 30 seconds (right arrow key), it will freeze. No keys will work at this point until I hit control-shift-backspace to restart the X server.

This morning I had the 1 second run, 1 second pause behavior, when I exited Myth, restarted, no video at all. Exited, had to kill the backened and then restart the front end to get video again.

I did this from the xterm this time, didn't see any error messages from mythbackend or frontend...

Any ideas?

Relevant Hardware:
Celeron 2.6ghz
Hauppauge PVR150 w/ ivtv 0.3.9
NVidia drivers 7676
AC'97 Onboard Audio
No xvMC
Extra Audio Buffering enabled(same problem with disabled)
Tried with and without libmpeg

I think its purely encoder related, because it hangs when I restart mythtv, which would reset all the software mpeg2 decoders, drivers etc. Not sure though.

I also THINK that it may freeze like this if its just playing live TV for 4 hours, so it could be a related problem to those who have this problem.

I am thinking its the ivtv driver. I am on 0.3.9 right now, maybe I should DOWNGRADE.

Help

My ring buffer is only like 40% full.. So its not any roll-over issue.

I also don't know what the magic amount of time is to wait, I've been checking up on it after 4 hours.

If I wait 20 minutes, it works fine.

I read something about nForce2 chipset that has this problem.


I have the nForce 250gb chipset. Perhaps disable local APIC and/or upgrade my motherboard bios....

I'm at work right now and can't test this from here,.... I'd appreciate some ideas if someone has some.

I can't find a consistent answer on disable APIC support through a kernel option passed in Lilo?...

the nolapic (local apic the one that generally causes problems) was added in the 2.6 kernel thus it can be turned off with a paramater passed to lilo in R5A?? but not in R4V?

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Part of the problem was my cache partition was overflowing.

I thought I did the math right, but it looks like it was too small. Mythtvbackend was spewing out:

safe_write(), errcnt = 1: No space left on device

I nudged the ringbuffer max size down from 9000mb to ~4000mb (4 gigs). I thought it was strange I can't specify the size, but have to use these odd increments.

I'll resize my /cache partition down to like 6 gigs, and then use the 4 gig setting in Mythtv. Even at 8 megabit, its 4.8 hours of pause buffer, which is pretty rediculous w/ 4 gig max buffer size.

Now I gotta let it run then see if I have the hang problem.