[mythtvnz] Booting prob on Setting up ALSA

[Nick Rout]

Zane Gilmore wrote:
> Hello there,
> The other day I thought that I would try to get mplayer going on my 
> mythtv box.
> It has never worked. I have only been able to play TV recordings but 
> this wasn't a problem but I thought it would be cool to be able to 
> play downloaded stuff.
>
> Anyway after following a promising line involving recompiling it. I 
> went to run mplayer for the Nth time and watching it go into a 
> deadlocked unkillable state I rebooted.
>
> All of a sudden The box won't boot!
> It hangs after printing the line:
> Setting up ALSA
>
> After a bit of rummaging around with a boot disk and disabling the 
> alsa-utils in the bootup I managed to get it to boot into a good 
> enough state to form a theory of what may be causing the problems.
>
> Every time I try to run the run-level script  alsa-utils with start or 
> stop the mixer seems to be causing problems with deadlocks as when I 
> attempted to reboot it locked up on trying to save mixer settings.
> (alsactl also got deadlocked at one point).
>
> Is there a possibility that the mplayer might have caused something to 
> leave the mixer system in some disarray?
> If so how would I fix it?
>
> sorry about the long post.

What is your soundcard? what is your distro? are you using the in kernel 
alsa drivers or external alsa drivers (most distros use in kernel, but 
bleeding edgers might use the ones direct from the alsa project, which 
tend to be ahead of the kernel code). Is your mythtv using alsa or oss? 
Have you tried backing up then deleting /etc/asound.state to see if some 
bad definition has got in there? Thats the file that stores the mixer 
settings.

Lastly, you don't need mplayer to watch external videos. You can set the 
mythvideo player to be Internal (the myth internal player - note the 
upper case "I" in Internal), xine, vlc or anything else you want.