<p>I've been experiencing this crash with an audio loop for months now, and put it down to a flaky system. Up until yesterday...</p>
<p>All but one of the crashes have been on a homebuilt 3Gz Core Duo box with onboard Intel video running 0.21 on Debian unstable (and previously Lenny, with the same crashes) connecting to the TV with an AVI to HDMI cable. But yesterday, after getting tired of the crashes (and the cooling problems, and the noise) I built a new system running 0.22 (built from source, as always) on an Acer AR1600 Atom+Ion box with the current Ubuntu Lucid beta, currently connecting to the TV with plain VGA, as I don't have an HDMI to HDMI cable yet. And lo and behold, it crashed in just the same way last night while watching SVU. (I know VDPAU is working since CPU use is negligible.) Apart from sharing a wireless keyboard (USB), a Streamzap remote, and displaying on a Samsung LCD, these systems could not be physically much more different, which leads me to suspect myth.</p>
<p>(Oh, and they do share the same backend, an Intel quad core running Debian Lenny, which has been serving since at least the 0.18 days, and has been using a pair of Pinnacle USB capture devices since we switched to US broadcast OTA. The frontends were both connected to the same wall port which routes to a Netgear gigabit switch in the machine closet that the backend connects to directly. We also watch lots from our laptops (Lenovo X41 tablets running Ubuntu, one Gutsy and one Hardy), and have never experienced one of these crashes there.)</p>
<p>One interesting tidbit about the crashes, is that on both systems the computer has required a second cold boot to work properly. On the prior machine, I would shut it down by holding down the power button until the power supply would turn off. Then when turning on again, it would not go anywhere, not even a BIOS splash screen. Another hard power off and on would be needed, then it would boot and run normally. On the new system it booted after the hard power off, but the video was stuck in an Ubuntu splash screen and X startup failed. I could ssh into the machine, but couldn't figure out a way to recover it. Not even a software reboot cleared the splash screen, but a shutdown and cold reboot brought it back normally.</p>
<p>So, any ideas? Any more useful information I can supply? System logs have not previously provided any useful reports at the time of the crash, which I'd always previously put down to dodgy memory or system overheating. I've been poking through the recent mail archives, and this report was the only thing that jumped out at me, particularly the looping audio bit.</p>
<p>Brian.</p>