I’m having a strange issue on what has been a very stable R5C7 front/back machine.

Almost every recorded show I play back will work for some period of time, but then the video and x-win and IR controls freeze-up; sound plays, usually sped-up, until the end of the file is reached. It then asks the standard delete question. I can ctrl-alt # to a text shell while X is frozen.

The error is repeatable, and occurs in the same spot, trying to jump past the spot does not avoid the issue. Old files and new files are equally affected. Identical problem occurs when trying to playback from a diskless frontend on another machine.

Files played directly seem OK – I can play them over samba connection in Win media player with no issues.

Thinking maybe this is a database issue, but I’m clueless. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Check the db for errors.

Followed the process outlined in the sticky post for "Repairing broken MySQL tables".

Code:
cd /var/lib/mysql/mythconverg
/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop
/etc/init.d/mysql stop
myisamchk *.MYI

No broken or damaged tables reported! What next?

I'm still seeing this problem - video freezes, sped-up sound plays to end of file - but it's not always in the same spot in the recording.

I can replay the file and usually get through it - sometimes the the freeze skip will happen multiple times. Occasionally, upon re-playback after a freeze, the section of the recording that was viewed before the freeze will not be accessible... it's really weird and really annoying.

Turning off commercial auto-skip seems to help - but I can't be sure.

Any ideas?

The internal player used to do this on DVDs if you tried to skip forward or backward. I don't remember ever seeing it on ordinary recordings however. A newer version of the MythTV software may cure it.

Looks like rebuilding the commercial flags has fixed it.

Here is the command:

mythcommflag --rebuild --all

btw, general playback seems improved by this, and skiping works more quickly with no screen aborations during jumps.