G'day all,
as can be expected, after performing flawlessly for the last 10 days (including 20 odd WC recordings and replays), my Myth box failed when my wife was using it. She was watching a show and the playback hung - typical.

Basically the scenario was this:
Watching prerecorded show, skip a bunch of ads, watch some more of the show, hit the 30sec skip button and then.... nothing but a pale blue screen.

A look at top showed that the box itself was fine, ssh, xterm etc. launched ok. The mythfrontend log had nothing untoward, but the screen remained a solid blue.
So I restarted mythfrontend and watched another recording.
- No dice, about .5sec of video and sound then blue screen.
So I restarted X, mythfrontend, and attempted to watch another recording.
- No dice again, no video, no sound, nothing but a pale blue screen.

In all cases, restarting X gets me back to the frontend with no probs, but watching video does nothing. It's as if the low level video driver refuses to play ball.

My setup is an EPIA SP13000 using the OpenChrome drives with XF86 4.5 and XvMC enabled.
I haven't done a hard restart yet as I have recordings going and I want to see if there is a 'soft' workaround that I can try if this happens again.

I'm hoping someone has some suggestions for me to try (or logs to generate for further diagnosis) so I can avoid future embarassment with the wife.

thanks,
Matt

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In search of Unichrome Pro salvation

I have seen the same behavior, and I don't use Knoppmyth (I use my own setup on Debian). I agree that the low level video driver is suspect, since my problem manifests itself with the audio for the recording still playing, but only a blue screen. In my viewing experience, the cause for me has been that from the recordings menu, I goto the "playback" menu where it allows selection of playback from beginning or playback from saved point. It was selecting something from this menu that I think has caused me to enter the blue screen situation. I've seen it about 5 times in 6 months, and very sporadically. My box has been up for about 20 days straight right now, so I haven't seen it in a while, but I also saw it twice in one night!

Also, it's not a blatant problem with the video stream, as I can reboot the box and restart the show and it will play it just fine with no errors.

Anyway, good luck making progress on debugging this thing.

I have seen rare instances of similar video weirdness using the nVidia driver. In my case, the video will remain frozen on screen while the audio plays fine. I can restart X all I want, but only restarting the whole box will clear this condition.

In my case it's rare enough that I haven't worried about tracking it down. I think it's happened two or three times in the last year.

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Update: It can be a Green SoD as well.
My frontend has hung three times since my first post, all with the same failure signature - except the screen ended up all lime green (like the green they use for filing sceens with special effects) which os not quite as soothing as the blue.

I have a little more insight into the problem, but still no real culprit. So far...
1. It only happens when playback/live TV is skipped.
2. Only when acceleration using Via XvMC is enabled.
3. Restaring X has no effect.
4. DRI and 'cleared buffer 0' appears in the XFree86 log. Don't have the last entry, lost it when I restarted <sigh>.

I suspect that I may have to live with this flakey front end, given I've used gr8nash's 'hack' to get OpenChrone XvMC working with XF86 4.5.

Suggestions/Comments/Places to look further are welcome.

Matt

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In search of Unichrome Pro salvation