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cesman
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Posted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 3:33 pm |
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Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2003 7:05 pm
Posts: 5088
Location:
Fontana, Ca
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Perhaps using the TV out on the Chaintech and disable out on the 350 to see if it makes a difference in the stablilty of the system.
_________________ cesman
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!
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tvmyth
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Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 7:39 pm |
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Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 7:10 am
Posts: 17
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My on screen guide was working fine for a while, and now it seems to be freezing....so, I don't use it anymore. I just watch live and recorded. You may want to use the 'restart myth via remote' option. I'm not sure where the posting is now, but I think the script is restartmyth.sh if you want to search. At least this will allow the family restart via a remote. I found using the cut down version that allows a restart with a single push of the button as opposed to the two-click within 3 seconds version. I had directory permission problems setting the two-click version. Good luck
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mrice
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Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:02 pm |
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Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:37 pm
Posts: 56
Location:
Ohio, US
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Well things have been about the same since I switched to isthmus. Mostly stable, but front end hangs (black screen) if you leave it on live tv when it starts a recording, or if you leave it on the "play recorded show" menu too long, or if you excessively use the on screen program guide. I don't know if this is related, but I can also not get it to record at 720x480 (only 480x480). I think it might be related since the resolution switch has to go through ivtvctl.
greywire: for me, "/etc/inid.d/gdm restart" doesn't seem to do the trick. I usually have to actually restart. Although usually killing the frontend process forceably and restarting it works also.
cesman: I didn't try the nvidia tv out but it is probably a good suggestion.
As a work around until I have time to start from scratch (probably with fedora/myth?) I have written a perl program that I installed as a cron task to periodically check for several bad things (no backend process, no frontend process, and "bad" messages in the logs) and subsequently restarts the box. The program is smart enought to not restart the system if a recording is currently underway. That way at least the family can use the system if I am not here to restart it, and I don't worry so much about leaving for a few days and hoping the backend doesn't die for some reason. I will post the program after I've tested it for a few days if it is helpfull to others. I think even if I was having no problems a watchdog like this is a good idea for something you are relying on for really important things like recording Lost or 24! 
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tjc
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Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2004 11:50 am |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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Just free associating...
There are a couple other PVR-350 threads one of which mentions this link:
http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php?p ... reVersions
Have you got the recommended version of the firmware and the recommended version of ivtv? Even if you think you have the right version it may pay to re-DL it and/or check the md5sum against the ones on the page.
The most common form of the "game over message" is when the tuner can't get a good signal lock. However what you're seeing indicates that the card simply isn't responding. I can see three likely reasons for the card not to respond 1) the driver told it to do something really silly and it's wedged, 2) there is a bug (or corruption) in the fiirmware that causes it to wedge, 3) there is a problem with the hardware itself (bad card, overheating, ...)
I saw similar program guide related issues when R4V5 first came out and I upgraded via apt-get. I've patched (and sadly lost track of) a number of things since then, but the biggest thing seems to have been upgrading the the nvidia drivers and the ivtv drivers. I really need to start keeping an admin notebook for the KnoppMyth system... 
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mrice
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 9:44 am |
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Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:37 pm
Posts: 56
Location:
Ohio, US
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tjc,
Thanks for the advice. I checked and as it turns out, my decoder firmware is the recommended version but the encoder is one version stale. I don't know if that could be the problem but I'd gladly upgrade if I could only figure out how. I donloaded the pvr_1.18.21.22168_inf.zip and unzipped it, but don't know what to do with it next (ivtvfwextract.pl won't do anything with the file).
Do you know if there is any way to upgrade ivtv and/or PVR-350 firwmare via apt? I am pretty sure I am using ivtv 0.1.9, although I tried several things and am not sure where I ended up. I read on Jarod Wilson's site that 0.1.10pre2-ck100z is a "good" version to use, but I can't find it anywhere. ivtv.sourceforge.net looks pretty out of date. I did find 0.2.0-rc3c, though, and I'm going to try that now _fingers_crossed_.
My watchdog script seems to be keeping things up and running, although it does reboot the system more often than I would have thought. It is almost always because it finds the "DMA error" messages in syslog following live tv watching or playing around with the "watch recordings" menus. Evidently, those errors don't always result in a black screen and hung frontend. I rarely get the game over messages. Luckily it never reboots when a recording is in progress and it only takes about 2 minutes to get the system back, so it's not a big inconvenience (at least, not when compared to having the system hang).
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tjc
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 1:20 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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For the firmware bins, you just copy them into the /lib/modules/ directory. Mine looks like this:
Code: root@black:/myth/tv # ls -al /lib/modules/ total 540 drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 May 31 2004 . drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Nov 9 23:28 .. drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Apr 10 2004 2.4.25-chw drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 10 2004 extra -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 262144 May 31 2004 ivtv-fw-dec.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 262144 May 31 2004 ivtv-fw-enc.bin drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 3 2003 misc
For the driver source tar balls, look here: http://205.209.168.201/~ckennedy/ivtv/OLD_good-ones/
Good luck! 
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mrice
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 3:12 pm |
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Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:37 pm
Posts: 56
Location:
Ohio, US
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tjc: the file I got from ivtv.writeme.ch doesn't contain any .bin files. The information there says that the firmware is contained inside the INF file, but I can't see how you go about getting it out. I have googled around trying to fine just the bin files, but to no avail.
Seperately, I tried making 0.2.0-rc3c but when I reboot X won't start. I have to re make 0.1.9 to get the system to come back to life. Probably something in my X86Config.
Thanks for trying to help.
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tjc
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 3:24 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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Search the forums here and the mailing list archives at http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/ for the name of the file you DL'ed. Also search the IVTV and KnoppMyth wiki. I know I've seen this within the last month. You may need to get a more recent version of the IVTV stuff first with updated utilities that do know what to do with that archive...
Hmmm... I just found this on the same IVTV wiki page I pointed you too before...
Quote: Note that after 37 releases with the firmware in the Windows drivers, Hauppauge decided to release the 38th Windows driver without the firmware. Instead, they placed it into the "inf" zip file. Therefore, the last several files listed (with inf in the filename), seem somewhat out of place, but they do, in fact, contain the firmware. Perhaps the change had to do with Windows driver licensing and Hauppauge's recognizing non-Windows users???
Even more to the point... The old .exe seems to be a self extracting zip file as can be seen by running unzip -l.
EDIT - OK, I looked at the Perl code for the extract utility /usr/src/ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck100z/utils/ivtvfwextract.pl and it looks like running:
Code: ivtvfwextract.pl pvr_1.18.21.22168_inf.zip will try to extract extract hcwpvrp2.sys when the file in the current zip file is capitalized differently as hcwPVRP2.sys so all you need to do is edit the Perl script very slightly. On line 45 change Code: $fw_driver_name = "hcwpvrp2.sys"; to Code: $fw_driver_name = "hcwPVRP2.sys"; and it should work just fine.
BTW - is it just me, or does the red and green color scheme seems to be in the holiday spirit? 
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mrice
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 6:13 pm |
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Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:37 pm
Posts: 56
Location:
Ohio, US
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tjc: After some serious snow shoveling (it is snowing here in cleveland like crazy today), I tried what you suggested and after a couple other little tweaks to the perl script I did get ivtvfwextract to create the bin files. So I copied them to /lib/modules and rebooted. Now checksums match the recommended versions, but, I am sorry to report, the frontend still goes black and logs dma errors if I try to leave it on live tv when a recording starts.
I think it's got to be the ivtv driver. Maybe santa claus will bring me a new ivtv driver; I figure he is probably a linux user.
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tjc
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 8:04 pm |
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location:
Arlington, MA
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mrice wrote: tjc: After some serious snow shoveling (it is snowing here in cleveland like crazy today),
When people talk about stuff like that I'm glad to have escaped from the lake effect region...  Boston is supposed to get 1-4" of snow tonight and tomorrow which is a joke by comparison with a good lake effect storm.
Did you upgrade your ivtv drivers to 0.1.10-pre2-ck100z or better too? You may even want to move up to the 0.2.x series...
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mrice
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 8:37 pm |
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Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:37 pm
Posts: 56
Location:
Ohio, US
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I had tried 0.1.10-pre-ck100z a month or so ago but it didn't help. I tried 0.2.0-rc3 earlier tonight but X won't start then.
Since I started running this script to periodically check on the health of the logs, I can't help but notice that this keeps appearing:
Code: Dec 19 21:27:03 io modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module char-major-81-1 Can anybody explain that or point me to some relevant docs? I don't know what this char-major stuff does; I have tried to dutifully copy what I find in the various wikis and tikis on the subject but may have made a typo somewhere. While checking around for that, I discovered that I may have the wrong tuner type set in my /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv. I would have thought that the thing would not have worked at all, but I just found that I had it set to 39, but this line is in /var/log/messages: Code: Dec 19 13:48:30 io kernel: tveeprom: tuner = LG TAPE H001F MK3 (idx = 68, type = 47)
So I changed it to 47 in the ivtv file and will reboot as soon as tonights recordings are over (can't go interrupting Desperate Housewives; my wife would throw the myth into the snow).
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mrice
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Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 9:27 pm |
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Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:37 pm
Posts: 56
Location:
Ohio, US
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Changing the tuner type appears to have helped alot! I am still registering dma errors (and some lost IRQ's) in syslog, but now if I am on Live tv when a recording starts, it doesn't go black and freeze up, it switches to the recorded show as it should.
Now I see some messages like this in /var/log/messages and wonder if I still don't have something set wrong:
Code: Dec 19 22:22:02 io kernel: tuner: tuner type not set
And, I tried again to record in HQ (720x480) and it still doesn't work. But this is a real improvement.
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