It sure is annoying when people read the first few sentences and post a reply based on that. My last sentence from above said



So all in all I like mythtv/knoppmyth and like to work on it/with it/for it. However before we let the love cloud our eyes we need to see it for what it is, a work in progress. High fives to the devs, it only gets better from here.

I guess that is directed at me.... I'd already dismissed this query because I stated all I needed to stated. I did read you entire post and what got me to respond was what you incorrectly stated about me considering this alpha....

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I've spent over a month solid configuring it, trying to coax it to work, so it is a labour of love and as the Myth team say written by developers for developers.

My knoppmyth (latest 30.02) consistently locks up in the GUI at various places for no reason (XFree86 = using full CPU). EG Scan New Videos; Watch previous recordings; play a video file it doesn't like; etc, so is a fun hobby to play with but for me is not stable at all and so is not useable as a main Media Center. TV-Out on most PC video cards seems to not be great quality. Aside from the TV Recording bit, the other aspects of Myth are far better implemented on Xbox XBMC.

So for me it's not really stable at all but great fun/frustrating to try and get working.

KnoppMyth and MythTV are very stable. What might not be stable is drivers for graphics and audio. So it depends A LOT on what hardware you are using.

If X locks up it's really not the fault of MythTV... It would probably lock up even if you were running Open Office or some other application.

No, It Always locks up in the exact same places in MythTV and occurs for example when going into watch previous recording after the last recording I made, whereas before it was fine. If I clean the database (AGAIN!) then the problem will go away, so totally a myth problem. Also when I tried to play certain avi files that presumably for some reason it didn't like (played others, nothing wrong with the files), it just locked up! I don't mean to knock the efforts of the team, but the OP asked about stability and no way is it remotely stable, not in my experience. I can make it totally lock up in maybe 10 different places by doing a certain sequence of commands. My hardware is an nforce2-IGP mobo + Haup DVB card so about as standard as you can get.

If it was really a problem with MythTV then more people would have the same problem...

I see a lot of people having stability problems, Most probably give up.

I dont want to get into individual bugs on a topic about stability, but for example my current lock ups may be linked to instigating a manual record for 30 mins, then stopping it 4 minutes early (as prog had finished). Running mythlink.sh it seems to be looking for a filename based on the time the show WOULD have ended had I not stopped it. Since doing that I get a lock up EVERY time without fail I go into watch previous recordings, so can no longer watch any recordings (end up watching them via windows box!). Were this a commercial machine it would need to be returned to the factory. That's a serious instability problem IMHO

I also said playing an .avi file that plays perfectly on any other player, including XBMC which also uses mplayer, Myth Locks up! Mmaybe cos it has 58 kb/s, monophonic VBR audio, who knows, very unstable to lock up when you don't like a file!

In WatchTV | Guide pressing the key to change to that channel and exit guide would often lock up. Record while watching live tv often fails. I could go on and on, Maybe you have got used to treating it with kid gloves and subconsciously avoid the bugs.

These ARE NOT obscure things peculiar to my system just general instability of the software. Put it this way 'Is Myth stable enough' to be released as a preconfigured commercial product for people to just plug in and use - No WAY, not even close!!! That said It's still a lot of fun to try and get working, trying to fix things is my equivalent of playing video games, (which I rarely play) and I've learned a lot more about linux than I originally knew. Have watched very little TV though

Hmm, it's the primary way I watch TV. Certainly if I want to watch hi def it's what I use. My TV has an integrated ATSC tuner, but other than hooking the antenna up to it, I haven't really done much with it. I much prefer to record my content and watch it when convenient. Or if I feel like browsing, I just use livetv. My biggest headache re stability is when I try to tune to a channel my tuner can't get a lock on (say it's a bad weather day). That kills my backend, but other than that, myth has been real solid for me since installing .18.1.

At my vacation cabin I have a myth system that's a little more downscaled. It has a couple of pvrx50 tuners and a 120M harddrive and just sits there and records stuff and auto-expires etc. Other than having a cron job to reset the date once a night it doesn't get any fiddling, yet it continues to run and when I get some time off and go there, I always have something to watch, which makes the $11.00 monthly cable bill more worthwhile to me.

In fact, .18.1 has been so stable for me, I am extremely reluctant to go to .19.

This thread about stability and the new release of myth has me wondering what what the testing process is for a new release. I did see some mention of testing in reference to people anxiously awating the next distribution of knoppmyth.

I am less than 2 weeks into my first experience with myth. The first night I tried to install knoppmyth, I had it up and running and watching TV. There were no install issues. It just worked.

By the next day, I added my config to the list of tier one hardware. I have since modified that post, because it was only tier 1, if you didn't use the TV out. That's a pretty major issue to a lot of people, including me. My point is that, I did minimal testing before proclaiming my install a sucsess. I have since installed on faster hadware and still have not tested my installation to my satisfaction.

I would like to see some detailed guidelines for what you should do before listing hardware as being tier one. Here are some ideas.

Complete list of hardware.
Any file modifications that were made beyond what is documented in the install guide.
A minimum standard for recording profile for testing purposes. This could be the default setting of 480x480 with a 6Mb bitrate.
Watch Live TV for 1 hour on one channel, rewind, skip no pauses.
Does TV out work?
Does commercial skip work?
Document how long it takes to change channels after watching 1 channel for x ammount of time.
Transcoding tests.
Grep for certain common problems in log files.


Does a list like this already exist? If so, I'd like to walk through it on my system to see where I'm at.

Thanks to everyone involved in this project and those who contribute to this forum, especially cesman and tjc.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5B7
Asus P4P800-VM
P4 2.4 Ghz - 1GB RAM
PVR-150 - HD-5000
Geforce FX 5200

Perfect example of what I mean. Because MythTV don't play AVIs. It uses mplayer or xine to play it.

XBMC uses linux version of mplayer and plays the files perfectly as does the windows version of mplayer. Myth 'OUGHT' to send mplayer a close command, then force close the process if that fails when an exit is requested, not lock up.

That said I have just tracked down some of my current instability issues to using 'interlaced' TV ouput. Though it works fine in 99% of Myth and LiveTV and gives a much better TV picture I have just discovered it appears that the XF86 lock ups that occur every time I enter 'previous recordings' don't occur when I use a diff (non interlaced) XF86Config (I have a few now). Tried turning off video preview on that page, but it still locks up. Very strange. Better go and search the MythTV list to see if this is just me. I'm getting there and having fun...

Nasty. 1) How did you stop the recording early?
2) Have you looked at the debug output from the frontend to see any errors before it crashes? (/~mythtv/.xsession-errors)

_________________
| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

The lock up on 'previous recordings' was I have now discovered caused by setting an interlaced TV output in XF86Config-4 NOT cos recording was stopped early. The rest of Myth, LiveTV etc works fine, but try to go into the prev recordings screens and it hangs with a partially drawn screen.

This is a shame cos unless you use an interlaced output the tv picture is rubbish, bad colours, flickery etc making myth unwatchable so It's either decent picture but unable to watch prev recordings OR bad picture so pointless...

HappyTalk - If you're not opening detailed ticket for these kinds of issues over at http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ you should be. For example the "change the end of a recrding in progress" thing is on the 0.19 fix list. If you're not providing the feedback where and in a manner that it will do some good, you're just wasting everyones time (unless you're getting paid by M$ to trash talk MythTV ).

In normal operations I've found MythTV quite stable. Over the last year or two I've found a handful of ways to wedge it repeatably, and the ones I've filed tickets for (in the current or previous ticket system) have generally been fixed quickly. Last time my folks visit they used the system without any problems and no hangs (Mom can set a VCR clock with the directions in her hand, but she's not a technophile by any means). A lot depends on your usage patterns and how far out into the dark corners you get.

Hi HappyTalk,
I have got to side in with tjc. up 119 days, 6 min, and never a sneeze. Recordings, tv watching, recordings deleted and replaced automaticily, manual records of various lengths, slide shows, playing music, recording internet radio streams (goes into the music directory) . Not to mention e-mail and browsing also plus more, alt tab is great.

I'm working on the phone and printing other wise KnoppMyth serves all my needs even beyond it's original task.

Don't even challenge the stability. If you are having problems look to bad memory, corrupted install cd, static electricity, over temp cpu and things of that nature. I am sure there will be a few certain situations "if I do this and then x plus z that at x time" and those need to be well documented then reported.

The other os could only wish to be this solid.

Thanks
Mike

Note: did I miss what hardware you are using?