[MPlayer-users] Re: mplayer audio from TV line???

[Jonathan Rogers]

Erik Slagter wrote:
> I only want to say that there MIGHT be a problem with the device driver
> and that MIGHT lead to memory corruption. I really have lost a complete
> file system this way once.

Yes, I'm sure you have valid reasons to be cautious; I wasn't dismissing 
your approach. I would be cautious too if there were other people's 
stuff on the system. I'm reckless with my personal machine and lose 
stuff sometimes (not often), but I learn in the process. To each his own.

I think I'm sneaking up on the cause of my problem. I just had to reboot 
again because I was recording and playing with ecasound again. I wasn't 
running tvtime this time, but everything else was the same. I failed to 
kill it quickly enough, so it locked up. I can probably rule out bttv 
and tvtime as culprits.

What I have observed several times during the lockups is that the ATA 
access light comes on solid, but it doesn't seem to be related to 
legitimate disk access. I've was watching my Gnome CPU and memory plot 
applets and there was nothing anomalous. There had been no significant 
change in RAM or swap usage; there was free space in both.

The ATA light didn't go off after I hit reset. In fact, the BIOS waited 
for quite a while trying to access the drive before I cycled the power. 
Could there be some interrupt problem? Both of my sound devices are 
using IRQ 7, so maybe there's some race condition there? Right now, I'm 
running ecasound again. Everything is the same as before, except I'm 
writing the audio to a file instead of playing it back. If that gives me 
the same problem, there's probably a bug in that particular sound device 
or alsa driver. If not, it may be a buggy interaction between the two 
sound devices in hardware or in Linux. I've never done much recording on 
Linux, but I've used the same device for realtime voice communication in 
a game on Win98.

Jonathan Rogers