This is with R5F1, on a Chaintech 7NIF2 motherboard, 1GB RAM, 300GB of HD space, etc.

I just installed a GeForce 6200 in my backend to solve pausing during playback (which indeed got solved after upgrading to the 9755 drivers, thanks to the wiki article on how to do it).

While I had my system down, I also took the opportunity to rearrange my cable setup that feeds my two analog tuner cards, a 250 and a 350. My old setup used an old four-way Radio Shack amp/splitter to run to two TVs, a VCR, and then another two-way splitter with push-on cables that fed the 250 and 350. I swapped out the Radio Shack splitter with a PDI one, got rid of the VCR (finally), and ran screw-on cables directly from the 4-way splitter to the PVR cards (removing a splitter and those push-ons).

Prior to all of this, and since the install of R5F1 (I was previously on R5C7), I'd noticed some tearing in some recordings of some channels, particularly with Disney Channel. It's not interlacing problems, it's like little spikes in the picture, tearing through horizontally. Very distracting. Well, now, with the arguably better connections, I'm seeing even more spiking, and with other channels too (F/X was the worst).

The two TVs connected to the same splitter don't show this problem on these channels. It's not all channels, and it's not affecting my HD tuner card so I don't think it's noise. It's not the cable as I swapped cables with no effect.

I've looked at the picture quality article on the wiki and I don't think it's the ivtv problem, plus it looks like R5F1 has a very recent ivtv version.

Anyone have any ideas what I could try next? Thanks.

I think there is a note in the R5F1 hints about this...

The only thing I see that mentions a similar problem is Known Issues #2, but that says PVR-150 and PVR-500s (I have a 250 and 350), and mentions the default 480x480 recording profile as a concern (I've changed mine to 352x480 or 720x480).

I'll admit it mentions VBI and turning it off, which I can certainly give a try.

EDIT: I turned VBI off in mythtv-setup/General but it doesn't seem to have helped.

Also, here's a picture to illustrate. Yes, it's a Pokemon marathon today. Here's a recent section of one.You can see the effect all up and down the sides of the frame, as well as the blue thing's ears. Interestingly, not all the recordings today on the same channel (remember, Pokemon marathon) show this: some look just fine.

That isn't what folks usually call tearing, which is when a swath of the video goes all pixelated and broken up, it's something else...

At a guess you've got some kind of sync problem happening. If you look you can see how the scan lines are intact but shifted by different amounts. The best place to research something like this is on the IVTV mailing list archives:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/ivtv/users/
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/ivtv/devel/

OK, I'll post over there.

I upgraded to the latest ivtv in the hope that it'd clear things up, but no such luck.

I posted to mythtv-users and only got a couple of replies. I searched ivtv-users and didn't find anything offhand.

Here's my only two new pieces of data, from /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log ... I'm seeing these two messages that don't look right:



and



Searching for "ac-tex damaged" turned up some messages but nothing on a solution. The first set of errors looks like it's trying to tune my analog NTSC tuners using ATSC. That sounds like a mythtv-setup issue that I've set wrong.

The problem continues to come and go on some channels, on some recordings.

I'm not above throwing money at this problem. Might I get better results taking my 250 and 350 out and just getting a 500? (I hate spending that much money on an analog card but I also hate not getting good looking recordings...)

It might be worth going through mythtv-setup and redoing the card setup. There are any number of changes in that area. I know mine wasn't happy with the new drivers until I'd done that.

You may also want to use the v4l2-ctl utility to dump the card settings and post them here.

Finally there is a 0.10.3 version of the ivt driver available along with upgrade instructions on the wiki. Nobody has mentioned any new problems with that version so it shouldn't hurt to try.

Just to close the loop on this:

* to EvilTwin, I actually had already upgraded to the latest ivtv. Didn't help.
* I posted to ivtv-users mailing list, and found someone else who had the problem with his older PVR-350 once he upgraded to a current kernel and ivtv version(mine is >2 yrs old). No solution, though.
* I confirmed that I _only_ have the problem with my 350 and _not_ my 250... I used WatchTV and switched tuners with the Y key, and a station that showed the problem on the 350 looked fine on the 250

So, I've ordered a PVR-150 from NewEgg and will replace my 350 with it (since I never use the TV-out anyway). Now that I've done that, someone will post a solution on the ivtv mailing list I'm sure.

One last post: got the PVR-150 in, replaced the 350, and problem is solved.

Kudos to KnoppMyth as configuration was easy. Its scripts detected the card swap and automatically ran mythtv-setup for me. I did have to run lirc-reconfig.sh by hand to get it to recognize the new remote, but that was very quick. In fact, it was faster to install the 150 and configure it than it was to reconfigure my Harmony 880 remote!