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PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 2:03 pm 
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Joined: Thu May 05, 2005 2:51 pm
Posts: 5
I've been running a Knoppmyth box for about 4 years now on a WinPVR-250 card, and it's been great. However, recently I decided to add a WinPVR150-MCE card to the mix to allow me to watch TV at the same time as I record another program.
When I installed the second card in and ran the hardware setup, the 150 replaced the 250 as tuner 1, so it's now doing the lion's share of the recording/watching work, and everything's fine there. But when Tuner1 is busy doing a recording and I am using Tuner2 (the 250 I've had for ages) to watch or record, I'm seeing a whole bunch of blocking (half the screen freezes or displays the wrong portion of the picture or pixelates), and visual noise, reminiscent of what others have said occurs when they watch satellite TV when the dish is being buffeted in a storm. A couple of notes on this, the audio seems unimpaired, and watching something where the visual elements are not changing that often seems to minimize or eliminate it. For example, watching a newscaster read from the desk is fine, but when it cuts to a shot of the Olympic swimming race, it all goes to hell. It also *seems* that lower channels on the tuner are more adversely affected than higher channels. So channel 3 (CBC where I live) is almost unwatchable, whereas channel 42 is mostly OK.
I've tried moving the cards around into different PCI slots, and the box doesn't seem to be that heavily loaded, even when both cards are doing recording, so I'm not sure what's happening here, or how to diagnose the issue. Ideas?


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:48 pm 
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Joined: Sat Sep 02, 2006 9:17 am
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When you hooked up the new card, did you grab an old splitter, or junky cables to hook them up? -- that's a real shot in the dark though.

It sounds like the problem is on the digital side. When you watch and record, you're really recording two streams to disk and playing one from the disk, that is you're really dealing with 3 video streams.

a couple of things to check.
Schedule 2 simultaneous recordings; but don't watch them live. After the recordings are done, is there blocking?

Is there blocking when you watch something previously recoded while there's something else recording?

what fstype is your /myth/tv? (ext3? xfs? jfs? riserfs?)
what video card? is it decoding the video or is the CPU?
what CPU do you have?


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 5:33 pm 
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Nope, bought a new splitter, and decent cables.

When I watch something previously recorded whilst recording something else, everything's fine. The blocking I see happening is only on the second tuner when the first is in use. If I set it to record 2 shows, the one recorded with Tuner2 gets blocking and Tuner1 is fine. Trying to record two at the same time and watch later has the same result, the second show on Tuner2 is all fubar. I've ran it through MythTV Player and made a few screenshots of what I'm seeing, which is here:

http://www.mcinnes.ca/mythtv-tunerissue.png

FStype of the /myth/tv partition is ext3
Video card's an nVidia AGP card (don't recall model, think it's an FX5200)
Processor is an Athlon 2800+, and there's 512MB of RAM in the system


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:56 pm 
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It appears that the problem is not in my original 250 after all, but has always been in my new 150. They switched places /dev/video0 and /dev/video1 in the config on me when I installed the 150, so I was mistaken about which card was acting up. Once I figured that out when I went back and double checked, I found this:

http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.p ... =pvr150mce

and colinnwn's post set me straight. All I had to do was alter the capture resolution in all of my recording profiles to 720x480, and I've been watching live TV now for about 15 minutes with no blocking, noise or freezeframing. I am tentatively calling this one fixed.


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:21 pm 
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Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2004 11:00 am
Posts: 9551
Location: Arlington, MA
This is covered in the Hints and has been since at least R5E50.

Please READ THE HINTS! About half the questions or problem reports we get on any given day are already covered there.


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:39 pm 
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Tjc, I did look in the hints. You mean this here, yes?:


4) There is a known IVTV driver issue with some PVR-150 and PVR-500 cards glitching (tearing, pixellation) when using the default 480x480 recording profile and VBI encoding. Using a 720x480 capture resolution and/or turning off VBI is strongly recommended for these cards.


If you read my initial post, when I wrote that I was under the impression the issue was a problem with my PVR250 card which I've had for ages, NOT the new PVR150 card, so what I read in the hints I thought was not relevant.
I guess the real lesson here is triple check your setup before making presumptions as to what's actually going wrong.


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 5:46 pm 
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Location: Arlington, MA
Since all your cards of one type generally use the same recording profiles they need to be compatible with all of the cards. I'll look into rewording that to emphasize that if any of the PVR cards in your system are PVR-150s or PVR-500s you need to make the change.

We haven't heard much from people upgrading R5F27 to R5.5 about card assignments shifting. Are you upgrading from an older version? There was a number of notes in the R5F27 Hints and earlier about this aspect of the switch over to udev., but device assignments should be the same between R5F27 and R5.5 for common hardware.


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