On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 09:09:30 -0400, you wrote:
>Since I'm retired and forced to stay home a lot due to Covid-19, I've been
>experimenting with a bunch of media software to learn and stay busy.
>
>My production backend is Mythtv v31 on Ubuntu Server 18.04 with a UPS power
>backup. It is stable as a rock. Only gets rebooted when updated. I do
>find that my Shield TV running Mythfrontend, Leanfront, or Kodi is mostly
>stable but occasionally fails and I have to restart the app, hardly ever
>having to reset the Shield TV.
>
>I've been testing combos on RPi4 and old PCs and find the frontends fail a
>lot more than I find acceptable. And since I can't fix the frontend without
>resetting the whole combo I can lose recordings.
>This seems to be true with Mythtv v30 and v31 and it's true with LibreELEC
>TVHeadend.
>
>My biggest issues seem to be screen freezes, and the combo forgetting it's
>resolution for the TV when the TV is powered off at night. With the combo
>on a PC, I can ssh in and restart lightdm and that sometimes fixes the
>resolution issue. However, on Raspbian or LibreELEC I find rebooting is
>the only way out.
>
>So I'm wondering if this is similar to other's experiences?
>
>I don't think I could ever use a combo FE/BE in production based on my
>experiences.
>
>JIm A
I have an FE/BE system. With my old Nvidia GT220 card, it was
completely solid for many years. When I upgraded to the GT220, I had
a couple of driver lockups that went away as Nvidia fixed the drivers.
After that there was around 5 years with no troubles. Since I have
changed to an Nvidia GT1030 card, I do get occasional video lockups
again. I did nave a couple where the entire PC stopped, so I updated
the Nvidia drivers to the 440 series from the PPA and that is better.
I have had one video lockup since, but the backend was still fine and
recordings kept happening. I was able to restart the desktop using
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (which I had re-enabled many years ago). This
feels like Nvidia driver bugs again - it only happens when I am
playing a recording or a video.
The other problem I have occasionally is with the DVB-S2 tuners - they
are used for my satellite pay TV service, and occasionally the
software doing the decryption from my pay TV card does something
strange and restarting it does not fix it, so I have to reboot. This
one feels like a software bug too, and as I have most of the source
code I do hope to find the time some day to work out the exact
problem.
My mother's old FE/BE MythTV box was even more reliable than mine. It
had an ancient Nvidia card builtin to the motherboard. It only ever
got rebooted for kernel upgrades. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago it
started to crash every night after she had been watching a recording
for about an hour. Given that the motherboard was over 11 years old,
it was not worth trying to fix it, especially as it had only 4 Gibytes
of RAM and Nvidia no longer provided drivers for the builtin video, so
it could not be upgraded past Ubuntu 16.04. And it was swapping a lot
too - MythTV has grown quite a lot over the years. I thought it was
probably a thermal hotspot developing on the CPU somewhere - the
thermal paste breaking down. So it has been replaced with a new
motherboard and is using my old GT220 card, and we are hoping for
another 11 years. It has not had any problems in the week it has been
running, and the upgrade meant I could add two of my old DVB-S2 tuners
to it and give her the satellite service as well. And MythTV showed
just how good it is - it instantly found a new series of "The
Durrells" to record for her from the satellite. She was very pleased.
So my story seems to be that the video drivers are the thing that
causes serious problems. That seems to be the case for a lot of
people. Life would be much better if we had open source drivers that
we could fix ourselves - Nvidia do not always fix things. And these
days they are abandoning the older chipsets at an alarming rate.
BTW The resolution problems can normally be fixed by an xrandr command
from a terminal on the desktop. I have not yet set up my xorg.conf to
prevent the use of my TV's interlaced modes and since changing to a
GT1030 I often get the TV going into 1080i mode, which is a pain as
the text does not display properly. It is fine for displaying 1080i
recordings, of course, but I would prefer that the TV stayed in
progressive modes and the Nvidia card did the deinterlacing, so that
the text MythTV displays (for the I key, for example) displays
properly. At the moment, I just Alt-Tab to a terminal and run 'xrandr
-r 52" which reselects 1080p mode and everything is fine again, until
I stop playing the recording or do some other screen change such as
Alt-Tab. Working out the -r number to use seems to be a matter of
trial and error. I tried -r 52 as the native refresh rate of the TV
is 50 Hz, so the correct number was likely to be 5x. For a 60 Hz
screen it is likely to be 6x. Fortunately my TV displays the mode for
a couple of seconds when it gets changed, so it was quite easy to see
when I had found the right mode.
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