Hi folks. I just recently (about a week ago) got my Myth box set back up after dumping it for a stint. (A guy gave me a free Tivo Series 2 box with a lifetime channel subscription already tied to it, and I was struggling with a lot of freezes/crashes in Myth anyway back then. But now the Tivo died on me with an "unexpected CPU detected" error - which seems to mean a bad CPU in it.)

So anyway, I did a fresh install from scratch of the latest Knoppmyth, ran the script to get the nVidia drivers installed, added a few tweaks such as enabling samba and updating xmame to the latest version (0.97), and was generally pretty pleased with it.

BUT - the other night, I left it watching "Live TV" and went to bed. The next afternoon, I turned on my TV and saw a blank screen. The Myth box was completely unresponsive to my remote control or even hitting ESC on the keyboard. After I rebooted it and took a closer look, I saw that it did properly record the show I had scheduled for that night, but did not record one it was supposed to grab for the following morning. So I guess both backend and frontend had crashed? I looked through the log files and didn't notice anything obviously wrong, other than SQL reporting an application was still using/locking some records so it couldn't successfully update something. (Didn't see this since then though, and running a repair on the database turned up nothing wrong. So I figure this was a result of the crash, rather than a clue as to what caused it.)

The next night, I made sure Myth was sitting on the main menu screen instead of watching live TV, and the next day, it was still running fine.

I'm going to experiment again with leaving Myth on "Live TV" overnight to see if my crash re-appears. But I have an odd feeling it will. This is exactly what I got before with my Myth box last time I had it set up (though it had other problems too back then).

For the sake of completeness, I guess I should list my hardware config too:

- GeForce 4 TI 4600 video
- Pentium 4 1.8Ghz w/MSI i845 series motherboard (integrated NIC and audio)
- Hauppage PVR-250 board
- 512MB of Corsair PC2100 memory
- Logitech USB "Rumblepad 2" cordless game controller
- 250GB EIDE Maxtor hard drive
- Lite-On DVD+/-RW dual-layer drive

I know this probably isn't going to be enough info to make someone say "Oh yes! Here's exactly what you need to do it fix that!" ... but I'm at least curious if other people ran into this same kind of problem consistently? Like I say, I can watch live TV and it looks and works fine for hour after hour. But if I leave it running long enough and come back to it, it seems like it always eventually crashes/freezes up on me.

Sounds like the live tv buffer is filling up. Perhaps a search of the forum.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I checked this out on mine, and after several hours running, that's exactly what happened.

I thought 'ring buffer' meant it loops around & starts writing over itself (the earliest material.. ) when the allocated space was filled ??

it will however if you have the ringbuffer size set for say (just picking numbers out of thin air) 6Gb on a 5Gb partition then you are in trouble, because it will run out of physical partition space before it starts overwriting.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

XSecrets,
I understand exactly what you're saying - and sounded like a good theory to me. But when I checked my ringbuffer settings in Myth, it was set to the 2nd. smallest size option possible (I believe about 9000K). I definitely have plenty more free space than that on my hard drive partitions.

So I'm still a little puzzled here - but my experimentation continues.

do a df -h to make sure you have the space. on occasion a ringbuffer file will get left behind and needs to be deleted.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Do not confuse the in memory ring buffer size set from within the frontend config screens and the "Live TV Buffer" set from the mythtv-setup (Alt-S from the "penguin on a couch" desktop) on the 2nd page under "General".