Hi all,
I recently got a DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Lite card (QAM/ATSC/NTSC) for my KnoppMyth box.
No problems getting the card recognized, no problems scanning channels in HD or analog. Basically the Setup part of MythTV was fine.
So, when I go to watch live TV, the picture is terrible. The sound is choppy, and the video becomes pixellated every time there is motion on the picture, and sometimes even when there isn't (like for example one of the channels has only TV color bars and even it gets messed up every couple of seconds or so).
Analog is another problem. No sound and the picture is black and white. The MythTV setup guide is found here:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/DV ... HDTV5_Lite
This says that analog sound must be attached manually from the tuner card to my sound card. Fine, I'll work on that later, but there is no color and I have no idea why. My analog tuner on my VCR shows the channels just fine in full color, so I know it's not the analog signal over the cable.

I was just using an AirStar 5000 which did not have these audio sync/pixellation problems in HD/digital (I traded in so I could get analog as well - the AirStar doesn't tune analog). So, I don't think there's anything wrong with my digital signal over the cable as well.

My specs are:
KnoppMyth R5E50
3.2 GHz Pentium-4
512 MB RAM
400 GB Ultra-IDE hard drive
nVidia Quadro 55/ 64 MB video card

Has anyone had this problem with the Dvico FusionHDTV 5 Lite or a similar card? Thanks for your help.

Don't scan for analog channels, let "Retrieve Lineups" do it's thing. Only scan for digital channels.

Your system specs are fine for playback. Are you using QAM or OTA? I have the Fusion HDTV5 Lite connected to my basic analog BrightHouse cable and have no problems with the HDTV channels they are passing through.

Can't help you here. I tried the analog tuning capabilities a couple of times, couldn't get a decent picture. From what I've read here and on other forums, this is typical of the combo NTSC/ATSC tuners - Digital quality good, analog quality bad. I didn't spend any time trying newer drivers or anything as we already had a PVR-350 and PVR-150 in the box.

Thanks for the reply.
Update: I've installed the FusionHDTV5 card on my Windows XP PC (similar hardware specs), and hooked it up to the same cable and it has worked much better - the analog is in color and not choppy (haven't messed with sound yet), and the digital doesn't have the same pixellated effect, although it still gets out of sync every 5 seconds or so.


Sorry, I forgot to mention. My digital scanner only finds channels when searching for QAM-256. VSB-8 and the other QAMs find nothing.

Could it be QAM-256 has a higher bitrate and that is slowing it down? Still, doesn't explain why it works much better in Windows XP if that's the case.


Yes, sorry - I did do the "retrieve lineups" or "fetch channels" or whatever for analog. Perhaps the channel frequency information is off from Zap2It and I'm only getting the luminance part of the signal without the chrominance (or whatever it's called)? I don't even know if those signals are split on an analog broadcast - just conjecturing.

From your description of the problem, I'd almost guess you were using the default nvidia driver instead of the optimized one. It sounds like your video isn't keeping up with the display -- that's why you get the choppy sound and pixellated picture. Or at least it COULD be...

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I know, it sounds like that right? But I have the 9755 driver loaded successfully, thanks to the help from this forum.

anyone have any ideas how to work with this problem?
Thanks!

Double check the DMA settings to make sure they are enabled on your hard disks. Triple check the output of the X startup log to make sure it's not complaining and reverting to a slow video mode.

Something is definitely not right since I'm playing HD at 1080i with software decoding on a 3GHz P4 and have nary a problem.

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Are you trying to use XvMC, and if so did you fix the issue with the library configuration in /etc/X11/XvMCConfig to make sure it points to the correct location?

So I changed that XvMCConfig file, and changed the MPEG decoding to Standard XvMC, and wow what a difference. It plays great, except when the OSD is up, and then the audio stutters and both video and audio go in slow motion. I changed the OSD to only last 1 second when it's up (and be eco-transparent), but with a 3.2 GHz processor and hard drive in DMA mode (that has very fast speeds when I run an "hdparm -Tt" test), it seems that I wouldn't have this problem. Is it because my video card is only a 64 MB nVidia Quadro?

Also: fixed the analog channels from being in black and white by changing the TV playback type to NTSC in myth-setup General (I had it on ATSC because I thought that would affect the digital signal. It didn't.)

Thanks for your help so far and if anyone knows any solution to the audio/video stuttering when the OSD is up, let me know.
And: is there any way to make Xine play live TV? It seems to do quite fine with MPEG2 on movie DVDs. I couldn't find anything about that in the settings, though.
Thanks!