[mythtv-users] PVR-250 stability

[Anthony Lau]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 04:25:43PM -0500, Jeff_Mitchell at accessbusinessgroup.com wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I recently (read: a month or so ago) purchased a pair of PVR-250s, and a
> 120GB hard drive to upgrade my Myth box, and I've been having some weird
> behavior that I'm trying to track down.  Every once in a while, I get a
> recording that's a 0-length file.  Once I get one of these, I'm unable to
> get anything out of either card (either through Myth, or via catting to a
> file), and I have to restart my Myth box to get things recording again.
> Another thing that I ran into was my OS hard disk (a lowly 18GB) getting
> filled will log messages from the ivtv driver.  I fixed this by just
> cronning a job to kill the offending log files hourly.  (Yes, I know it's a
> nasty hack, but it was done around Thanksgiving, and I seem to remember
> being rushed.)
> 
> I'm thinking this is caused by the driver getting borked somehow, and I'm
> wondering if other people are having the same issue, or if I somehow
> managed to screw up the driver installation.  Basically, I just need
> someone to tell me what I'm getting isn't common, so I can get the courage
> to hit the ivtv site, and try reinstalling the driver.
> 
> Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.  BTW, Isaac and all the other
> devs, this is a great package.  I have had great results with Myth, and my
> wife is really happy to be able to watch her favorite shows whenever she
> wants.  Thanks for all of your hard work, guys (and gals, if applicable.)
> 
> -Jeff

Yes, I have the same problem. I, without scientific reason, blame
it on my crappy VIA motherboard [Aopen AX34-U (VIA 694T [Pro 133T]
(support Tualatin CPU ), VIA 686B].

I can usually just quit the frontend and restart the backend to fix
the problem, but sometimes the ivtv driver seems seriously borked
(won't accept EOS signal is the error message) and a restart
is needed.

Do you also notice truncated recordings? Mine frequently dies in
the middle of recording a program. It seems the more I want to
watch the program, the more likely that program gets truncated.

I have notice an increase in this behavior if I am doing anything
else that is constantly doing I/O, like playing some music or
transfering files or even surfing the net. This actually seems like
that nasty DMA bug in VIA chipsets.

I'm about to switch one of my other computers to become the PVR
and will use an nForce2 motherboard.

Anthony