It seems that every now and then my system decides to record a program and I get nothing but a green screen and any program recorded after that ends up recorded in black and white.

I have been able to track down the error in my kern.log at the time the screen goes green. Here is a snip of the log ...

Feb 25 15:59:53 ]mythtv kernel: bttv0: irq: SCERR risc_count=1f85c008
Feb 25 15:59:53 ]mythtv last message repeated 4 times
Feb 25 15:59:53 ]mythtv kernel: bttv0: aiee: error loops
Feb 25 15:59:53 ]mythtv kernel: bttv0: irq: SCERR risc_count=1f85c054
Feb 25 15:59:53 ]mythtv kernel: bttv0: aiee: error loops
Feb 25 15:59:53 ]mythtv kernel: bttv0: resetting chip
Feb 25 15:59:53 ]mythtv kernel: bttv0: PLL can sleep, using XTAL (28636363).

Seems like when the chip resets itself it seems to not be choosing the proper input. Here are my system specs ..

Asus P4S533-MX Mobo with 2.4 P4
512 Mb of Memory
Nvidia Gforce 440
Leadtek Winfast 2000/XP Tuner Card

I have the following loaded with my modules and bttv ...

options bttv card=34 tuner=2

If anyone has an answer to the above problem I would greatly appreciate it.

Ns.

for grins try adding gbuffers=8 to that line.

Did it and just a minute ago it happened again. Seems like it's happening every 10 recordings or so.

well I didn't really think that would fix the problem, but it was worth a shot. It seems some of the error messages are related to IRQ's is the tv card sharing an irq with anything? if so you may want to try moving it around in the slots to see if you can get it an irq of its own.

I'm sure of it. I have a micro atx mobo and only have 3 free pci slots. And all of them are occupied right now.

Ns

If you are not using you serial and parallel ports you can disable them freeing up those IRQs.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I have disabled everything I don't need (The only On Board stuff I use is LAN and Serial for my IR Blaster.)

I user cat /proc/interupts and noticed that bttv and lan shared the same irq and my audio card was alone. I switched the audio card and the bttv card around and now the bttv card sits alone with it's own irq. Let's see if this clears up the problem.

Ns.

I guess putting the Leadtek card in itg's own IRQ didn't do the trick.

I have also notriced that this happens every 10th show I record, like clock work.

This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that I am using DMA on all of my Hard Drives now would it ?

Ns

using dma on the harddrives shouldn't have anything to do with it. And if it really is happening every 10th show the only thing I could think is that something is wrong with your database. You might try dumping the database and reimporting a fresh one then resetup. I know this is not a good option, and I can't remember all the commands off the top of my head, but maybe one of the database gurus will pipe in with something better to try.

I've alreaddy tried starting from complete scratch twice.

For all the reading i've been doing on the bttv mailing list this problem seems to stem from the pci bus not being able to keep up with using DMA and the demand of bttv at the same time.

The only resolve I can think of is rebooting the machine every 4-5 days (I record about 10 shows every 5 days)

Maybe a cron job to reboot the system. I just don't know how healthy that would be for the system.