I have searched for others having a similar problem, but none of them seem to match what is going on for me.

About a month ago I became unable to fastforward faster than 3x (same for rewind). I did not change any settings, it seemingly happened on its own. After some observation, I found that the hard drive seems to be working overtime. I know this because the hard drive light is on almost constantly when viewing a recording (or making a recording). I can no longer record a program and watch another one without the recording having a few errors in it (usually dropped frames).

To me, it sounds like a hard drive may be dying. But I am not sure. Any ideas?

Hmm. Mine only does 3x for a few seconds, then it drops out on its own. I wonder now, if my disk may have trouble keeping up? I've always considered this to be a bug in Myth, but maybe my system isn't meeting the demands. I've got DMA on, and a 7200RPM IDE drive pair, in a LVM.
HD-only system.

I was just searching the forums on this subject. I think my search strategy was "fast forward freezes". The solution was to change the "Preferred MPEG2 Decoder" from "libmpeg2" to "Standard." You can find this in Setup/TV Settings/Playback.

I had the exact same problem and found a fix. Hopefully this will work for you guys too.

Follow the steps in this thread:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... t=database

Specifically the post by Spud which states:



Martian

_________________
ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

thornsoft, my problem sounds a lot like yours. I still haven't found a fix.

crushinator, I had a similar problem a few months ago, and indeed, switching to standard for playback does fix the problem.

I followed the steps to check my MySQL tables, and no errors were found. It seems that this is a slightly different problem anyway. The commercial skip works just fine. It is the fast forwarding that doesn't work properly.

At this point, I'm still looking for tips or suggestions.

I didn't find any error in the SQL tables either. The problem didn't go away until after I ran

Martian

_________________
ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

If it's an IDE hard drive, have you enabled DMA?

FWIW, I've ordered a 750GB SATA300 from NewEgg ($125!), and will be moving my recordings onto it once the new KM with storagegroups arrives. I'll re-test this and report. My theory is that when FF'ing an HD stream, the disk can't keep up, and the FF function runs out of data.

How much memory to you guys have in your Knoppmyth boxes? I recently upgraded to 2 GB on mine and saw improvement in fast forwarding HD content. I can now fast forward past the 3X mark.

Interesting... I've got 1GB, and could go to 2GB. @#$% DDR is expensive though. I think I've got a pair of 256 DDR sticks around here though, and may throw those in when I add my new HD.

I have an ATA100 (IDE) hard drive in my box and since I ran "mythcommflag --rebuild --all" I can fast forward and rewind at any speed even in 1080i recordings. I does give my drive quite a workout though!

Please note I have to have my decoder set to "Standard".

Martian

_________________
ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)