vompclient crash / watchdog

[Sir George]

Hi folks!

First, I'd like to thank you for vomp! It's the perfect application for the MVP and my VDR

However, I have some small issues:

• I sometimes lose the connection ("Connection lost") when reading the recordings directory or after deleting a recording
• more seriously, vompclient crashes when I stop replay of a recording and immediately restart the same recording

Maybe it has something to do with the many small files I have on the video-partition, so seeks on the video-directory take too much time.

As a preliminary workaround (and to save the power connector of the MVP *g*) I wrote a small watchdog for vompclient; a patch for the dongle-directory is appended. Grep and sleep support has to be in busybox for this hack to be working.

[Chris]

Hi, the restart is a good idea. I had thought of making a switch to vompclient which makes it start up with a "I crashed, tell the developers why" sort of screen and alternate between the two in the dongle startup script.

You are right with the connection lost during disk scans, it will be because VDR takes too long accessing the file system. The problem with this is that it is the same timeout as with video playback, and it's not nice to have a long timeout on video playback non-startups because the MVP is unresponsive while it waits. I will think about how to change this, as other people have very large video directories and it does cause problems.

The crash is new to me. When you say immediately do you mean that it is the next thing you do, or you do it very quickly... Could you describe exactly how to make it crash?

[Sir George]

Hello Chris,

I had to try really hard to reproduce this error now But I finally managed it with Hero *g*
After watching about 15 minutes, I stopped the replay with the stop button, waited about 2 seconds, and restarted it with play (which means resume). Then  about 25 seconds later, vompclient crashed with a segfault. Logs can be found here: http://rafb.net/paste/results/hI4BCz82.html
However, during my tries I noticed that sometimes I just got a timeout message when restarting the recording. Maybe it has something to to with the new code, since I use the cvs-version from sunday. Before I had more crashes, IIRC.

BTW, thanks for your appreciation of my little hack
Maybe it's really just my clumsy use of the video directory. I have a directory named IMAGES in there which contains all sorts of files... maybe I should play a bit with symlinks to hide that from vdr.

[Sir George]

Hi Happy New Year!
After hiding the non-VDR data on my video partition from VDR, I had no significant timeouts anymore, and not one crash.
Nevertheless the crashes before were quite strange. Maybe you, Chris, or someone else has some time to investigate?
Thanks!