On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 06:38:06PM +0200, Damien Bally wrote:
Last night VDR crashed with these messages :
[...]
May 17 03:51:10 georgette vdr: [5321] cVideoRepacker: found system start code: stream seems to be scrambled or not demultiplexed May 17 03:51:13 georgette kernel: Fifo still full, trying stop May 17 03:51:14 georgette vdr: [5321] dxr3: sync: push timeout May 17 03:51:16 georgette vdr: [5322] ERROR: 1 ring buffer overflow (177 bytes dropped) May 17 03:51:16 georgette kernel: Fifo still full, trying stop May 17 03:51:18 georgette kernel: em8300.o: FIFO sync timeout during blocking write May 17 03:51:21 georgette kernel: em8300.o: FIFO sync timeout during sync May 17 03:51:22 georgette vdr: [5322] ERROR: 15563 ring buffer overflows (2925844 bytes dropped) May 17 03:51:24 georgette vdr: [5318] dxr3: fatal: reopening devices took too long
To your opinion, what is the reason for this crash ?
My guess is bad input signal, if you are using DVB-T. About a year ago, softdevice used to crash in such situations, until Martin Wache played with a portable antenna, to force bad signal quality on purpose. He fixed some dynamic memory allocation bugs to get rid of the crashes, if I remember correctly.
On the dxr3, if the bug is in the closed-source firmware, you're out of luck. If it is in the kernel module, it may be hard to debug. But it could also be in the dxr3 plugin, which will need to demultiplex the video stream and pass it to the dxr3. That plugin could filter out invalid packets.
If I were you, I'd suspend the video output when it's not being watched. Suspending the output should reduce the possibility of a crash and also (perhaps not so much on the em8300) save some electricity and fan noise. Possible solutions include: (1) play a recording and hit Pause, (2) apply my patch (http://www.iki.fi/~msmakela/software/vdr/#suspend) (3) the suspendoutput plugin
Marko