Has anyone else had this problem with recording randomly stopping in the middle? It happens about 1 out of 5 times I try recording things.

My Hardware: PVR350, I815e Chipset, P3-733, 512MB ram, 80GB video drive.

It's not because it's running out of space or anything. It happens randomly. Sometimes while I'm using the frontend, sometimes when it's not even open, and sometimes it causes other problems (guide won't come up, etc.) sometimes not. Myth just decides to stop recording by itself. Rebooting fixes the problem and it starts recording again (my computer isn't locked up, though).

Usually once recording stops, it won't start again until I reboot. I also get lockups if I press the guide button in live TV at anytime (the transparency thing maybe?).

I tried installing updated IVTV drivers, but it made no difference. How should I try to solve this problem?

Start by looking in the logs.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Thanks cesman, you rock!

Not quite sure what to look for, but here are some things I found in the logs:

In mythbackend.log

QSettings: error creating /.qt
QSettings: filename is null /empty

(I searched on this one and it seems it isn't usually a problem, but I have about eight or ten of these very often in the log.)

KICK DATABASE
SELECT NULL; // hmm. Why select null?

(seems weird, but was only in the log once, not when the programs were turning themselves off.)

MPEG2VIDEO @ 0x8111d8] ac-tex
MPEG2VIDEO @ 0x8111d8] damaged at 12 7
MPEG2VIDEO @ 0x8111d8] concealing errors
MPEG2VIDEO @ 0x8111d8] MVs not available
(I don't know if any of these are a problem and was only in the log once--not too near the time my program ended itself in the middle.)


In debug log file:

mythtv kernel: ivtv iflags=8, 3 s_sflags=4
mythtv kernel: ivtv iflags=a, 3 s_sflags=4
(there were a number of these types of messages)

In messages log file:

mythtv kernel: DMAP not set
(a number of times)

I ran a repair of some of the corrupted MySQL database tables as mentioned in another thread. There seemed to be about 4 or 5 corrupted tables (record, recorded, recordedmarkup, oldrecorded, cardinput).

I don't know enough to know if any of these messages look ominous. I mostly saw other things that looked normal in the logs (such as playback started, recording started, etc.).

The weird part about some of it was that it looked like some of the programs that were cut off half way through showed that they supposedly stopped recording at the correct times in the log.

Thanks again. I would've never got this working without all the good help here. I wish I weren't such a Linux newbie so I could be more helpful to others instead of always needing help. Maybe when the semester ends and I have more free time I can write up some info about how I got everything working to help other newbies like me out.

Repair all tables and try again...

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I repaired the tables, but it didn't fix the recording stopping problems (though maybe helped slightly).

I got tired of waiting 5-15 minutes for FSCK after a system lockup or reset, so I figured I'd better install a journalling filesystem so fsck wouldn't have to drag it's butt around the hard drive looking for errors for so long. Changing my filesystem to XFS on the LiveTV partition and my recording drive has essentially fixed all problems that I've described in this thread.

I thought people having similar problems might want to know in case it helps them. I've recorded 20+ more shows and this problem hasn't reared its ugly head again. I'm thinking MythTV is pretty useful and cool at this point since I can rely on it to be stable now.

Do a search for XFS and there is a thread about formatting to XFS instead of ext2. Don't know if it will fix everyone's problems that are similar to this, but it sure helped mine.