watching live TV for long periods: can I?

[Linuxgrrl]

My family are generally having a great time with Mythtv and its ability to serve content how/where we want. Kudos to everyone who contributed to this amazing software.
Our latest use case is taking advantage of the many commercial-free, talk-free music channels that our cableco provides. Unlike the cable box, the myth box is hooked into whole-house audio, so we've been enjoying doing Saturday chores while playing music through mythtv.
The problem (on several levels is that our chores take a long time. After a couple of hours, mythtv stops playing. I've checked to see if the disk is full (using df) and it does not appear to be full. I have used a disk analyzer to try and find a giant file that I can delete, but I can't find such a file. Based on the wiki i assume that live TV is storing to the same directory as normal recordings. I half expected that directory to be full but it was not.

Is it just a bad idea for me to play live TV for hours at a time? Or is there something I should change / adjust in order to do it?

[wesnewell]

What dir do you have set for live tv. The default used to be /var/lib/mythtv/livetv. Open a browser. Go to webfrontend.
http://localhost:6544/
then select Information>backend status and go down to machine information.

[Linuxgrrl]

Here's the information that appears there:

Code: Select all

Disk Usage Summary:

    Total Disk Space:
        Total Space: 692,152 MB
        Space Used: 391,433 MB
        Space Free: 300,718 MB

Disk Usage Details:

    MythTV Drive #1:
        Directory: mythbox:/media/mythtv
        Total Space: 593,852 MB
        Space Used: 334,364 MB
        Space Free: 259,488 MB
    MythTV Drive #2:
        Directory: mythbox:/media/music
        Total Space: 98,299 MB
        Space Used: 57,069 MB
        Space Free: 41,230 MB

[wesnewell]

That doesn't even indicate a dir for live tv or even default. here's where stuff gets stored.
wes@mythfe0:~$ ls /sdb
2021-02-20-14-img banners coverart default fanart livetv lost+found music pictures recordings videos
wes@mythfe0:~$ ls /sda
livetv lost+found recordings
wes@mythfe0:~$
And here's my webfrontend disk usage.
Disk Usage Details:

MythTV Drive #1:
Directories: mythfe0:/sdb/default, mythfe0:/sdb/recordings
Total Space: 1,876,768 MB
Space Used: 123,234 MB
Space Free: 1,753,534 MB
MythTV Drive #2:
Directories: mythfe0:/sda/livetv, mythfe0:/sda/recordings
Total Space: 468,427 MB
Space Used: 32,825 MB
Space Free: 435,601 MB

[paulh]

If it consistently stops playing say after 2 hours then it is probably exiting LiveTV after it's been idle for a while. There is a setting to control that under the TV Settings -> Playback -> General Playback -> Live TV idle timout (mins). Try setting it to a larger amount or set it to 0 to disable the timeout.

If you like listening to music while you do chores and you have MythMusic installed then the Radio Stream player is a good source of 30000+ free radio streams, many commercial free, with stream to suit any musical tastes you have . That reminds me I need to pester Stuart A to update the radio stream database again

[Linuxgrrl]

thanks all. I did not have a default directory set for live tv, so I assume (?) it was using the default directory for recordings, /media/mythtv. In any event I went in and set it to that, so at least I'll be sure. I checked the timeout setting -- good thought, but the timer was disabled so I don't thing that is it.
I do have mythmusic installed but unfortunately I do not have good luck with the radio streams. The interface hangs when I try to use it, then when I get past that, the individual streams hang.

[bill6502]

You could check the backend log for anything unexpected at the time the recording stops.
Checking each time the recording unexpectedly stops may show a similar event. Not a
guarantee, but worth a shot.