[vdr] Re: Unknown Picture Type and Video Data Stream broken Bug inDriver

[Laurence Abbott <laz@club-burniston.co.uk>]

On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 20:31, Stefan Hagendorn wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> since updating to 2.6.x Kernels and adding 2 Nova type cards I have those 
> Video Data Stream broken errors (the nova suddenly does not deliver data 
> anymore). Up to today I had never any Unknown Picture Type Errors.
> 
> Today I updated the Kernel to 2.6.10-rc1-bk15 and vdr to the latest 
> Version (1.3.15).
> 
> with this new constellation I reloaded the box and started vdr. At the 
> first recording goes straight to the bin - I got the well known and only 
> by reboot fixable "Video Data Stream broken Error" this was not really a 
> surprise BUT
> 
> this evening a recording is running and I discovered an
>  "Nov  5 21:10:01 voyager vdr[3373]: ERROR: unknown picture type '7'"
> Error .. This is really a very bad surprise.
> 
> Afaik there is still now solution out there - but does really no-one have 
> a clue where the error comes from (afaik it never happens under 2.4.x 
> kernels with the old drivers)

This may be what I've seen a couple of times after a few hours of live
TV, followed by watching a recording. When I stop the recording, the
screen is just black. The femon plugin shows that the frontend is
locked, etc. but the bit rates are zero! Changing channels still gives a
black screen (someone mentioned on the list that changing transponders
fixed it for them: doesn't for me). As you say, the only recovery is a
reboot: restarting vdr and reloading drivers doesn't work: still a black
screen. This is with vdr-1.3.15, recent CVS drivers, a Nova-T, and a
DXR3 for output.

The other day, I saw a load of errors in my logs when this had happened
(it has only happened to me about 3 times so it's hard to debug!). What
I saw was a load of "ERROR: can't open filter handle on ..." errors (I
think: the box is turned off at present!), and a while load of "Too many
open file" errors. I also see errors about vdr not being able to write
setup.conf.$$$, channels.conf.$$$ (are these temporary copies?), and it
doesn't update any marks I've made, presumably in the time when it ran
out of file handles!

I am assuming that this problem arose from either vdr or the drivers
(I'm running Gentoo on that box and I rebuilt quite a lot of stuff that
day so that might play a part) and that sounds quite plausible to me:
something grabs all of the available file handles so that vdr cannot
open the dvb device once playback stops.

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max shows something like 51072 (not sure where
that default comes from!) and later on, when things were running nicely,
cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr told me that I had 450 files open. At the time
of the error, it never occurred to me to actually check this but I will
when / if it reoccurs. Not sure if this is a runaway condition in the
driver or vdr which grabs all available file handles or what!

I've also been seeing the UPT errors since vdr-1.3.13 but I don't think
that's related to this other problem of losing the DVB stream, and I
think I will be increasing MAXNUMUPTERRORS from 10! ;)

Cheers,

Laz