Hi All,

Well, I had Myth visually working well with one PVR-250, but my cable channels come in on 2 different lines. So I made the poor choice to add a PVR-150MCE for Cable B and screwed everything up.

The 250 used to be /dev/video0, but when I added the 150 it got /dev/video0, and the 250 was reenumerated to /dev/video1. Didn't change the 250's PCI slot by the way. I also didn't want to screw up my channel guide, so I decided to switch the 250 to Cable B, and give the 150 Cable A. I had the problem below and decided to rescan the channels on the 150 in case it was a tuning problem. Of course that didn't fix it, and it ruined my channel guide anyway, but that is the least of my problems.

Now when watching cable A on the 150 at dev/video0, the display gets "choppy." It will flash the image again out of phase on the screen for a split second, then go back to normal. It happens so fast, it is almost like pixelation, but it really isn't. It gradually happens more frequent the longer I watch. The audio is usually not affected unless the video chops a few times repetitively and then the audio goes silent.

I looked in the logs specified here
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... ngLogFiles
but I didn't see anything that stood out at me.

I tried http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... add+pvr150


It didn't help either, and strangely the script did not change the /etc/modprobe.conf file I had to create before running it at all.

I tried resetting my IDE PCI latency from 32 to 176 as described here
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/PCI_Latency
But that didn't help.

At first when I tried to switch tuner cards, I would get an x-term saying no other inputs found. I just tried it again and it worked. The 250 is just as pretty on Cable B as it had been on Cable A.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to figure this 150 deal out? I can post logs, but I didn't know which of the logs would be most relevant. And I didn't want to flood the thread with all 9 logs on the wiki.

Thanks.

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Trying to install KnoppMyth R5F27, ECS 671T-M, Celeron 430, 1gig RAM, 320gig SATA Seagate, Samsung SATA SH-S203N DVD drive, Onboard video and audio, DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite, Seasonic S12II-330watt PS

Swap the cards around so that they're in the opposite slots. Hopefully this will get the original card order back.

If that still leaves the new PVR-150 as video0, run mythtv-setup, drop all your capture cards, recreate them with an eye to the new ordering, and redo your input connections to link each card with the appropriate video source. The mythtv-setup walk through on htis wiki page http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=BlackScreenWatchingTV provides more detailed directions.

Thanks.

I did as you said and it got the 250 back on /dev/video0 and the 150 on /dev/video1. Can dropping and readding the cards really effect which card gets which dev? I actually did that to see if it would help the bad picture. Myth told me which card was at each location and I couldn't figure out how to change it.

Unfortunately my biggest problem remains. Cable A on the 250 looks as good as ever. Cable B on the 150 still has the weird video choppiness. I followed the wiki you pointed out. I got down to the tuner type, and checked that I don't have one of the known strange tuners. Is it time to try updating to the most current stable ivtv? I think it's 0.10.0 for the R5E50 kernel.

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Trying to install KnoppMyth R5F27, ECS 671T-M, Celeron 430, 1gig RAM, 320gig SATA Seagate, Samsung SATA SH-S203N DVD drive, Onboard video and audio, DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite, Seasonic S12II-330watt PS

Back to the Upgrade Hints posting... See the bit about bumping your capture resolution to 720x480 to work around a known issue in the ivtv drivers...

BTW - No, dropping the cards and adding doesn't change the detection order, it just lets you get the correct settings for the cards which ever order they are assigned by the kernel. In your case the more important bit would probably have been redoing the Input Connections, but don't discount the value of getting rid of stale card info in the DB. I recommend it for anyone who is changing their capture hardware since it clears up a lot of silly issues.

Thanks to tjc, my box is almost perfect.

I ran across this issue before here
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0
But ethernut's post had a quote saying it was applicable to "cx25840." Since I had a cx23416-12, I discounted it entirely. Mistake number 1.

On the next page of that thread, Rala seems to have fixed it by just disabling CC. That didn't work for me. So I continued on to changing the capture resolution to 720x480. Took a while for me to figure out it was in the Recording Profiles menu under PVR-XXX and you need to change 'Default' and 'Live TV' at a minimum.

I didn't change any of the other bitrate settings yet because I wasn't sure what I should change them to, and didn't want to stop to research. The 150 picture now looks like the 250 looks when it was working fine at 480x480, at least to my untrained eye.

But then the 150 picture started freezing momentarily with the audio. Both would recover perfectly. Now I was betting it was the PCI IDE latency issue above. I changed it to 176, and then to 200. Very occasionally I get a super quick halt in the audio that is a little jarring, I can't detect a halt in the picture. But I am pretty happy now.

I did reenable CC and it appears this 150 revision will capture video and CC fine as long as it is doing it at 720x480.

Now my next big thing is to figure out how to map the video card change command to my PVR grey remote. But that is for another thread if I can't figure it out on my own.

I hope this helps some future noob adding a PVR-150 card. If anyone has additional suggestions to clean it up, I would love to hear it. And thanks again to tjc.

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Trying to install KnoppMyth R5F27, ECS 671T-M, Celeron 430, 1gig RAM, 320gig SATA Seagate, Samsung SATA SH-S203N DVD drive, Onboard video and audio, DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite, Seasonic S12II-330watt PS

Most of that early install and upgrade experience has been folded into the R5E50 Upgrade hints and hazards thread. I just updated the head posting there to clarify a number of issues and make certain things more accessible.

As for recording profiles, my 720x480 uses an average bit rate of 6000 and a max of 8000, with an audio sample rate of 48000 and an MP2 bitrate of 384k.