Overall, MythTV works beautifully. One of only a couple problems I've been having is that when I try to launch some videos from MythVideo, the entire system locks up and I have to perform a hard reset.

Most videos play fine. When I try to launch one of the problem videos, the frontend freezes, displaying the "Loading" in white text, but not the filename. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace will not kill Xorg, the system is totally unresponsive and I have to hit the reset button.

I have tried using both MPlayer and xine and neither has had any effect. I've found many people having similar problems, although none exactly the same and none of the solutions that worked for them (directing output to /dev/null, setting file permissions to 755) have helped.

I'm using the packages from the Ubuntu repositories on Ubuntu 5.10 and I have a GeForce4 Ti4200 using the official NVIDIA drivers. Can anyone provide some insight?

You're a bit low on details especially for a question related to a non-KnoppMyth install. Little things like what kind of hardware, what versions of software, ... would make this less of a guessing game... Otherwise we're stuck giving you generic "Magic 8 Ball" answers.

For example, have you tried connecting to the system remotely using SSH and running top or tailing the logs before kicking off the killer videos? This might give you some clues as to why and where it's falling down...

Ok, a bit more detail then. I'm using Ubuntu 5.10 (kernel is 2.6.12-10) on an Athlon XP 2000+ w/ 1GB of RAM. I have a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 (ivtv version 0.4.0 and lirc version 0.7.2) and a GeForce4 Ti4200 with the official NVIDIA drivers (version 1.0-7667). I'm using the precompiled MythTV packages from the Ubuntu repositories, they're version 0.18.1.20050510-1. The MySQL version is 4.0.24-10.

I don't have another machine here to SSH to this box. The only logs I know of that are related to MythTV are the backend logs and there is no useful information there.

A little more about the problem; the videos will play fine if I just play them with totem, MPlayer, gxine or whatever else. The frontend acts like it's freezing before the video player actually launches (displays "Loading" text but freezes before the filename can be printed on the screen).

Thanks for the quick reply.

Check the X session log... http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=CheckingLogFiles

What are sizes of files locking during play? I ran into issue with Mplayer having issue with files over 2GB, but that wouldn't explain Xine's issues with locking. Here is orginal thread

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... hlight=2gb

That looks very helpful, thanks. I'll check it out when I get home this evening.



Files range from less than 100mb to about 700mb, never anything over 1gb.