[mythtv-users] PVR 250 problems

[Steve Prater]

Quoting Mark Jacob <mjacob1 at san.rr.com>:

> > 
> > 1. Is everyone experiencing frequent lock-ups with the PVR250 and if not
> what 
> > did  you do to stabilize this?
> 
> Hard lockups (need to press the reset button) or application lockups? I 
> was having hard lockup problems when running a 2.4.20 kernel with low 
> latency scheduling and preemptible kernel patches. I switched to a 
> vanilla 2.4.20 kernel with the kraxel v4l2 patch and the hard lockups 
> went away.


Just application lockups. I compiled my own kernel but did not include the 
kraxel patch. I'll try that tonight.



> 
> > 2. In the past couple of days I've noticed the sound getting choppy/jerky
> and I
> > 'm getting a error something like "Soundcard not reporting size
> correctly... 
> > reverting to old method". Not sure If I've had this error from the
> beginning but 
> > I don't think so. Could this be related?
> 
> Are you using ALSA? I have an SBLive! card and when using the oss 
> drivers the sound was terrible most of the time. I switched over to the 
> ALSA drivers last night and the audio smoothed out considerably. Now I 
> have to run a kernel compile and chew up all the CPU to get choppy 
> audio/video.

Using ALSA as of last night. No change that I could tell.

> 
> > 3. When using my PVR card on a windows box I noticed that It had only 3 or
> 4 
> > selectable bit-rates Anyone remember what those are and could this be
> related to 
> > the smaller bitrate=choppy/jerky problem?
> > 
> 
> I get video jitter (noticeable on the cnn crawler) no matter what the 
> bitrate. Experimental A/V Sync and jitter reduction do not seem to help 
> much either. I'm currently recording at 740x480 with bitrate=2500000 and 
> bitrate_peak=8000000.

Have Played with the bitrates a bit. Never tried that exact setting will give it 
a shot. The jitter seems to only be in the audio at bitrate=8000000 and 
bitrate_peak=12000000.

-- 
Steve Prater