I just installed R5D1 after a hard drive crash blew away my old config. Every thing on the old one worked fine. I did find R5D1 to be easy to install and most of the tweaks I did are now in the new release. However. the sound is very annoying. It pops and sounds very tinny on every channel I am using SVideo in. I have a PVR-150 MCE and an older soundblaster card. I suspect an IVTV firmware problem but can not prove it. When I extract raw video from /dev/video0 I get nothing but black screen but MythTV has video so I am sure I have forgotten how to make that work. Any help would be appreciated.

ivtv: ==================== START INIT IVTV ====================
ivtv: version 0.7.0 (tagged release) loading
ivtv: Linux version: 2.6.17-chw-8 SMP preempt mod_unload 586 gcc-3.4
ivtv: In case of problems please include the debug info between
ivtv: the START INIT IVTV and END INIT IVTV lines, along with
ivtv: any module options, when mailing the ivtv-users mailinglist.
ivtv0: Autodetected Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 card (cx23416 based)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:09.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 23
ivtv0: Unreasonably low latency timer, setting to 64 (was 32)
tuner 1-0061: chip found @ 0xc2 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
cx25840 1-0044: cx25841-23 found @ 0x88 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
cx25840 1-0044: loaded v4l-cx25840.fw firmware (14264 bytes)
wm8775 1-001b: chip found @ 0x36 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
tveeprom 1-0050: Hauppauge model 26032, rev C199, serial# 8181817
tveeprom 1-0050: tuner model is TCL 2002N 5H (idx 99, type 50)
tveeprom 1-0050: TV standards NTSC(M) (eeprom 0x08)
tveeprom 1-0050: audio processor is CX25841 (idx 35)
tveeprom 1-0050: decoder processor is CX25841 (idx 28)
tveeprom 1-0050: has no radio, has IR remote
ivtv0: loaded v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw firmware (262144 bytes)
ivtv0: Encoder revision: 0x02050032
ivtv0: Allocate DMA encoder MPEG stream: 128 x 32768 buffers (4096KB total)
ivtv0: Allocate DMA encoder YUV stream: 194 x 10800 buffers (2048KB total)
ivtv0: Allocate DMA encoder VBI stream: 120 x 17472 buffers (2048KB total)
ivtv0: Allocate DMA encoder PCM audio stream: 455 x 4608 buffers (2048KB total)
tuner 1-0061: type set to 50 (TCL 2002N)
ivtv0: Initialized Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150, card #0
ivtv: ==================== END INIT IVTV ====================

OK, more info. It is not ivtv nor is it my sound card. It is MythTV application. When I do a straight dump of /dev/video (after configuring IVTV for input correctly), I get excellent picture and sound. But when I go to live TV, the sound pops and is very tinny sounding. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Hardware:
Powerspec PC with 2.4 Ghz P4
512MB Ram
500G HD
Sony DVD Recorder
Soundblaster Live

Make sure you're not forcing your mixer volumes to 100% In MythTV since that can cause this kind of thing.

Where is the mixer setting. I know the adjustments in the card menu under PCM. Is that where?

That's one of them. I forget where the other is. Maybe under playback profiles? I went through this for someone not too long ago. Basically don't push your recording volume (capture card - recording profile?), PCM volume, or Master volume (playback profile, general) past 90-95% or you can end up with nasty distortion and artifacts. Since alsamixer and the internal controls mess with (most of *) the same settings you can use alsamixer to check/test them in a single centralized place before hunting down all the places in the applications.

(*) - For PVR cards the capture volume can be checked (65536 is 100%) using:

This is what the card is set too when MythTV fires up. Adjusting the volumes in the MythTV General settings seems to have no effect and seems to be adjusting the volume of the sound card. I can manually set it down but before MythTV starts but it sets it too these volumes as soon as it starts recording.

ioctl: VIDIOC_QUERYCTRL
Brightness = 128
Contrast = 63
Saturation = 63
Hue = 0
Volume = 58880
Balance = 32768
Bass = 32768
Treble = 32768
Mute = 0

The ivtv one is definitely not set by the control under general, it's in your _recording profile_ and when you use "g" or the menu ("m") watching live TV to change the tuner settings. BTW - That one (of the 3-4 possible input and output volumes) looks fine. It's set to about 90%. Now you need to run alsamixer and look at the output volumes (PCM and Master) on your sound card.

Well, PCM seems very high so I turned it down with out affect. I do not know what Mythtv is doing but it is definately the problem. IVTV raw dump is perfect.

UPDATE: I got it cleaned up. But I have no idea how to "fix it". It seems that a command "ivtvctl -c stream=10" fixes the sound. I have no idea what this does but MythTV sets it back after every channel change. Apparently, the IVTV developers created a perl script to assist with the issue. Going to try this and cross my fingers.

Search for my external tuner scripts posting with the delayed_settings.sh script. Replace the settings it forces into place with that one. OBTW - it might also be worth while to upgrade to the ivtv 0.7.1 drivers. See the CompileIvtv page on the wiki.

Can I upgrade to 0.8? I actually wrote my on shell script channel changer to fix it. DCT-2000 + ivtvctl

No. From http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page - "ivtv stable version 0.8.0 released (ChangeLog). This release is for the 2.6.18 kernel ONLY."

R5D1 uses the 2.6.17 kernel, 0.7.1 is the parallel version that works with it.

Well, I recompiled the 0.7.1 version and still have the issue of the pops, clicks and tinny sound. Setting stream_type to 10 works every time to fix it. Live TV is good as long as I change channels which fires off the script to change the stream type. So, I can live with that however, recordings have the issue where stream type gets reset back to 0 after the channel is changed for some reason. How can I fix the recordings to use stream type 10? This is apparently something to do with the IVTV codec since stream type is a part of this. Would it be better to ask on the user forum of IVTV mailing list? BTW, I have also upgraded to the latest MythTV from SVN. I am not above making some changes in the code if that can fix this issue.

The delayed tuning script I pointed you too works for live TV or recordings. It takes advantage of the builtin external tuner "hook" which gets called by MythTV everytime it starts a recording or makes a channel change (which is the same as starting a new recording).

I got the following patch from Hans for ivtv and it clears the problem right up. However, be warned that it does not necessarily patch 0.7.1 To do this, I had to comment the lines out by hand and recompile. Hope this helps my fellow Knoppmythers. Note, the difference is that the itv->card->video... becomes itv->video in 0.7.1. Basically, it involves commenting out the dec_function call. Works like a champ.
Don

--- ivtv-streams.c 2006-09-25 10:34:59.000000000 +0200
+++ i.c 2006-09-25 10:37:12.000000000 +0200
@@ -787,7 +787,7 @@1G

/* Disable digitizer */
IVTV_DEBUG_INFO("Disabling digitizer\n");
- itv->card->video_dec_func(itv, VIDIOC_STREAMOFF, &dummy);
+// itv->card->video_dec_func(itv, VIDIOC_STREAMOFF, &dummy);

/* initialize or refresh input */
if (atomic_read(&itv->capturing) == 0)
@@ -797,7 +797,7 @@

/* enable digitizer (saa7115) */
IVTV_DEBUG_INFO("Enabling digitizer\n");
- itv->card->video_dec_func(itv, VIDIOC_STREAMON, &dummy);
+// itv->card->video_dec_func(itv, VIDIOC_STREAMON, &dummy);

return 0;
}

This patch seems to be working for me with ivtv-0.4.7 So far, no buzz or tinniness. I have a few recordings set up for tonight. I'll check on them in the morning.

_________________
Mike
My Hardware Profile