I just installed R5A22 from KnoppMyth on an AMD 32-bit system with a single PVR-350 installed. (I had done test installs a few months ago of 15, 15.1, etc, but never had time to finish the install properly or play much with it.) The installation was to a 200GB Seagate which I let KnoppMyth completely partion and start from scratch.

I happened to leave the machine up overnight watching live TV. It wedged in a little over 3 hours---totally unresponsive to keyboard or network, frozen image on the TV (I'd used the current getpvr.pl to get output to the 350's video out). I had to hit the reset switch to recover the machine.

That -might- have been a fluke. So I restarted the machine and left it watching live TV at 10:15 this morning, and as of 15:40, it -effectively- crashed, in a different way. It's currently responsive (I can ssh to it, etc) and is in the process of trying to fill up its disk logging errors of the form "ivtv0 warning: ENC stream 0 OVERFLOW #37770: Stealing a Buffer, 512 currently allocated." And the video is now black. It was apparently doing fine as recently as 5 minutes before I noticed black video and heard the disk thrashing.

Here's the really interesting part---/cache started out 0% full this morning, and is now 100% full. I happened to check at one point how fast it was filling it up, and it worked out to about 660KB/sec. If you take the 12601748K size of /dev/hda3 (/cache) and divide it by 660KB/sec, you get... 5.3 hours, which is just about exactly how long the machine was up (10;15 to 15:40).

So it looks like it just allowed /cache to fill up completely, and then crashed or wedged or -something- the instant it did! I wasn't monitoring the disk at the instant of the crash, so I can't prove that /cache didn't fill up half an hour earlier before the video died and the disk started thrashing, but it sure seems awfully suspicious.

I see other threads talking about turning off closed-captioning or VBI, and I may give that a try and see if the error recurs. (I'm -about- to turn that machine from its own master backend into the slave backend of a machine with a bunch of PVR-250's in it, though, so its configuration will change shortly).

But if anyone has some ideas on things to look for right now, before I do that, I can certainly poke around.

And surely this isn't what's supposed to happen, right? I'm supposed to be able to leave the machine on live TV -forever- and it's supposed to do the right thing wrt the /cache ringbuffer, right?

And is A22 widely considered to be stable enough to use? Should I just give up and install A16 for the moment? I'd rather have a stable machine RIGHT NOW than an unstable debugging target for a while, and if A16 and its versions of ivtv (or whatever) are more stable, I'll just grab that distribution and start over before I spend a lot of time dealing with this sort of misbehavior.

Thanks!

[And is there some more-appropriate forum I should have posted this in?]

Btw, I should point out that, in this state, the machine's UI still works, although it's extremely slow, no doubt due to all the disk thrashing---e.g., if I plug in a keyboard and hit ESC a few times, I -do- get the standard six-circle toplevel menu. But if I select "Watch TV", it goes back to black video.

Also, /cache/cache/ringbuf1.nuv is being continually updated; doing ls -alF --full-time on the file shows a constantly-advancing last-modification date that's in sync with the machine's clock.

Me thinks MythTV is configured to use all of /cache. Change this so it doesn't. I've been using A22 since before the public release w/o a reboot.

Me thinks MythTV is configured to use all of /cache. Change this so it doesn't. I've been using A22 since before the public release w/o a reboot.

Can you be specific about how to accomplish this change? I don't see it starting from Utilities/Setup on the main page; do I have to rerun mythtv-setup or something?

Also---what is the default setting for this? I recall seeing -somewhere- (when setting up a second machine, which is to be my real MBE) something about a menu setting which left 1G free for "other applications"; I left it alone on the MBE, and never touched that screen at all when I set up the currently-wedged machine last night.

(E.g., if the default is to use all of /cache, and that leads to problems, why is that the default, and if it isn't, why has my machine done so?)

Thanks!

Ah---do you mean the Extra Disk Space field in the General (Advanced) menu under TV Settings? (e.g., toplevel -> Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> General -> next -> next -> Extra Disk Space ?) [My god, what a confusing set of menus; it'd be -really- nice if the submenus had distinct names instead of having repeats of General and Setup in the submenus; in fact, I think I missed a "general" somewhere in the list above... Maybe if they said "TV Setup: General" or something to make it more obviious how the navigation was going?]

In any event, I'm pretty sure I did -not- touch that on the machine that's currently thrashing, but I'll swap keyboards around and see if I can get that far in the UI...

Looks like you're the first to run up against the problem I mentioned a couple days ago. The setting I mention here is in mythtv-setup.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6559

That said I managed to freeze my frontend as well (same error message as you) even though I set my buffer size to 4GB. So either my partition is a few Kb short or the ringbuffer isn't working properly. I did manage to SSH in and kill the backend.

I plan to test this by changing my buffer size to 1GB, cranking up the bitrate (to speed things up) and see what happens. If it still locks then Myth has a problem, if not I know my partition isn't quite big enough.

I would always leave a couple of hundred megabytes difference anyways to account for any stray files that may be there, and any differences in the calculation of space you know the old 1Mb =1024Kb and how do you display that etc.

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

Xsecrets

I thought I had it covered. A 4300MB partition should be enough. I'm wondering if my switch to XFS is the culprit. Perhaps it's not as efficient with space as EXT3? What concerns me is that when I killed the backend and did an ls -lh /cache/cache it listed the RingBuffer.nuv file at 4.0GB. If it made it to 4GB, why didn't it start looping?

So before I flail around, what exactly is the fastest way to resize the ringbuffer? What do I run? That's the one crucial bit of info that everyone seems to be omitting here...

Tnx.

Btw, thanks for the checkSize script---indeed, it claims that my BufferSize setting is 15 GB, but /cache is only 13 GB. Since this was an absolutely fresh install with no screwing around by me, the installer is clearly buggy & needs to be fixed. The UI shouldn't allow you to overspecify the ringbuffer in the first place, and the installer certainly shouldn't -default- to the wrong value!

(This was a fresh install on a 200 GB disk, which I let KnoppMyth partition for me.)

So now what's the fastest way to fix it?

Okay, I -sort of- see it---but it seems that my PVR-350's video output is sufficiently overscanned that I can't actually see the edges of the screen, so I can't tell what I'm doing! I'm not sure if replacing its version of my XF86Config-4 file will be enough to give me video back on my LCD instead of my TV; if not, it may be easier for me to blow away this installation and start over (given that it's currently slated to become just a slave backend on this machine anyway) and to make sure that my other machine (to become an MBE) has this parameter set (e.g., I'd better rerun mythtv-setup on it and make sure...).

*sigh*

Do other people find that their PVR-350's video output looks about 10% (or more) overscanned on their TV's? This is a reasonably-calibrated Sony Wega and hasn't appeared overscanned from any other input source...

That's such a Wi . . . that other OS kind of attitude. Nothing is wrong with your current install. Just switch back to the original XFree86-4 file, restart gdm, run mythtv-setup, change the buffer setting, switch back to your PVR XFree file, restart gdm and your done.

Remember that this installation is about to be repurposed into an SBE and have various other things changed at the same time, so starting over on it isn't as unreasonable as it sounds, given that it's got no effort invested in it besides the original installation and 5 hours of sitting there watching TV for me...

But I'll try the mods and make sure the behavior stops. -Then- I'll probably reinstall... But later---must run out the door right now; will try the changes in a couple of hours. Tnx!

(And it'd be nice to know why my non-video output onthe 350 is so overscanned; that's annoying, given that the machine will eventually be run "headless", e.g., with no video card and only output to the TV.)