This only started a week or so ago. Craig Ferguson will crash mythfrontend, but David Letterman, recorded on the same HD channel with the same HD tuner (HD HomeRun) plays normally. Tonight, "Big Bang Theory" will not play, with the error

2009-02-02 20:53:38.452 [mpegvideo_xvmc @ 0xb7245e68]get_buffer() failed (1 1073741824 2 (nil))
2009-02-02 20:53:38.452 AFD Error: Unknown decoding error

However, I can run mythfrontend on a MacBook and watch both Craig Ferguson and Big Bang Theory. Other HD channels are fine on the Knoppmyth box.

This is a strange problem, and I'm sorry I can't give any more details, but I can't think of why one channel is behaving like this, and why Linux can't play it while it works on a Mac.

If anyone has any suggestions where to start digging I would love to try.

Thanks!

There was some weirdness depending on resolution you might want to search for. Something like 1080i working but not 720p. First use mplayer or the like to check the resolution and the like on the different recordings and find out if there is a difference... (If you run mplayer from the command line it reports the recording tech specs. for a recording)

If I log in remotely, export DISPLAY=:0, and run mplayer, the recording looks and sounds fine! Playing from the mythtv recordings menu does not work. I recorded Leno and Letterman last night. Leno plays from mythtv, Letterman does not.

The only things I can see differently are the reported bit rate - Leno shows 65000 kbps, which looks like a default value, Letterman shows 15600, which looks reasonable. This is probably not important.

When I play a CBS show, I get these error messages from the command line mplayer, but I can watch the show and it looks fine:



So I poked around the setup screens and I found that my playback profile was set to CPU+, which uses xvmc. I switched to Normal and now my CBS shows play again!

In /var/log/mythfrontend.log I still get these messages with a CBS show:


I don't see these on non-CBS shows. Anyway, thank you for the suggestion! I wouldn't have known where to start looking!

Well, either you jinxed me, MythTV hates Big Bang Theory, or something's weird about how XvMC plays it back.

Read your message this morning, then went down to walk on the treadmill and watch shows from my remote frontend (an old Athlon 2400+ which needs XvMC to play back HD).

24 (Fox, 720p) played back fine. Big Bang Theory (CBS, 1080i) crashed the frontend every single time.

Moreover, if I selected Live TV, I could watch Fox and ABC (720p), I could watch NBC (1080i), but if I tuned to CBS, the frontend crashed out to the desktop.

I could watch Big Bang Theory on the MythTV front end I have on my Ubuntu 8.10 system, but that's got enough horsepower that it doesn't require XvMC.

Haven't had a chance to look at any logs yet, will report back when I do.