Fixed: Missing 80 Seconds From the Beginning of Recordings

For over a month now, some of my recordings have been missing 80-90 seconds toward the beginning. I would notice this mainly while watching "The Daily Show", but never with "The Colbert Report." The monologue would start, and then the video would skip, and I'd hear the audience laughing, not knowing what I'd missed.

I could just write what the problem was, but I think it's useful to see how to go about solving these type of problems in Linux... Of course, that's once you get over the temporary state of depression that usually follows a Linux system problem.

Where was I.... Oh, so I checked the log files, and found occasional entries like this:

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Apr 8 15:55:09 mythbox kernel: [316852.916516] ivtv0: All encoder MPEG stream buffers are full. Dropping data.
Apr 8 15:55:09 mythbox kernel: [316852.916523] ivtv0: Cause: the application is not reading fast enough.
A
----------------------------------------------------

So there's the culprit. Now what? I should mention at this point that myth writes all of its data to a networked Linux file server, mounted by NFS. So, something's going on where myth tries to write to my file server, and the file server, for whatever reason, isn't grabbing the data fast enough, and Myth gives up, dropping it. After 80-90 seconds, it's able to resume writing.

I recalled that I had recently done an "apt-get dist-upgrade", which had upgraded the kernel, as well as just about everything else in the machine. Problems after such an upgrade usually lead to a particularly depressing state of... er, depression. And any error in your log files that contains "ivtv" (or any other driver)... just makes it worse.

Since this was happening at the beginning of "The Daily Show", but not "The Colbert Show," I figured that maybe the NFS server was in some sort of state where it needed to be woken up, and that once it was recording, it was able to successfully record the rest of that show and the next one as well. Basically, I didn't want to deal with this, so I ignored it for now.

After a month of this, I still wasn't ready to fix the problem -- it was time for a hack. I changed the recording schedule for "The Daily Show" to start 5 minutes early, so I wouldn't miss anything when it decided to drop 80-90 seconds of video.

The first time I watched my new recording, I was really upset to see that the video still cut out at the same spot! But... This was a clue! It's not the case that the file server was asleep at the wheel - there's something going on at the top of the hour! This also explains why "The Colbert Report" was never affected - that starts up at half past the hour.

So I started looking through /etc/crontab, but didn't see anything that runs on an hourly schedule on my file server. I then looked through my Webmin screens. Webmin seems to have its own task scheduling system -- I could be wrong, but didn't see anything in the crontabs that point to it. I found that I had an hourly task to backup my databases.

It's entirely possible that this backup could be CPU-intensive enough to tie up the server long enough for my MythTV box to have nowhere to drop the data. So I tested this by running the backup command from the console with the "time" command.

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time /etc/webmin/mysql/backup.pl --all
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'time' is an awesome command. It just runs whatever is after it, keeping track of how long it takes to complete. This took.... 80 seconds.

Problem solved.

Backing up the database hourly is unnecessary anyway - I only archive that backup once a day, so the other 23 are just overwritten and forgotten. That must have been an accident.

So, I changed this to once-daily, at 3AM, and the problem went away.

It's hard for non-Linux users to understand how rewarding it is. Sure, these problems happen, and if you give up, it's hard to deal with. But, if you hang in there, it becomes a high tech riddle. Solving something like this makes the whole experience worthwhile.

Using 'screen'

I wrote a simple script to start a 'screen' session on my mythtv box when the mythtv user logs in, at ~/bin/start_screen.sh

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#!/bin/bash

screen -d -m
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This starts a detatched screen session. I can now ssh into the mythtv box, connect to that screen, and execute commands in the context of the logged-in mythtv user. Before I had setup irexec to run in its own start-up script, I used to launch it from this screen session. And now that I've been using synergy, there's even less of a reason to keep this screen session around. I'll still keep it going, just in case :)

This page is what got me started with screen.

Synergy: My New Best Friend

I wish I had heard about Synergy sooner. This app is so cool. If you have a laptop, and run MythTV, you'll wish you've been using it all along as well.

From Synergy's site:
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Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).
---------------

I use Synergy to let me control my mythbox from my laptop. This is not the same as VNC. I don't see the mythtv desktop from my laptop. I'm still using my TV as a monitor, but using my laptop mouse and keyboard to control it. It's very handy for watching web videos on my tv through mythtv, or just to interface with myth a little faster than with my remote control. My mythtv box doesn't have a keyboard plugged into it anymore.

I have my system setup so that my laptop is the synergy server. The server is the machine that has the keyboard and mouse that you want to share. I created a simple script on my mythtv box that starts the synergy client when the mythtv user first logs in (through the session start-up scripts configuration) at ~/bin/synergy_client:

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#!/bin/bash
synergyc --name mythtv [laptop ip address]
---------------

When I want to control my myth box with my laptop keyboard and mouse, i start up the synergy server on my laptop with a simple script named ~/bin/synergy_server:

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#!/bin/bash
killall synergys
sleep 1
synergys --config /etc/synergy.config --name laptop
---------------

If both the server and client are running, I just move my mouse to the right edge of my laptop's screen, and it's now on the mythtv box. Any keyboard activity is sent to mythtv. The clipboard is shared between the two machines. If I want to confine myself to the current box I'm in, I just turn on Scroll Lock. This will prevent the mouse from moving outside the current context.

For reference, here's my laptop's synergy config file:

section: screens
laptop:
mythtv:
end

section: aliases
laptop:
[laptop's ip address goes here]
mythtv:
[mythtv's ip address goes here]
end

section: links
laptop:
right = mythtv
mythtv:
left = laptop
end

section: options
screenSaverSync = false
end

Starting 'irexec' on reboot

Every time I reboot my MythTV frontend/backend box, I'm annoyed that I have to sit in front of my tv with the keyboard to open up an xterm window and run 'irexec' so that the "wife button" works to stop/start MythTV Frontend when it's misbehaving.

I tried setting 'irexec' as a start script in Gnome, but that never worked. I found the answer to be embarrassingly simple... Wrap the command in your own bash script, then set that script as a startup script.

So in /home/mythtv/bin/start_irexec.sh :
#######

#!/bin/bash
irexec

#######

That's it! I set that command as a startup command in Gnome, and now I can unplug the keyboard, and reboot anytime I need.