[mythtv-users] poor quality tv from pcHDTV (dvb)

[Mark Fischer]

On 7/12/07, Ian Forde <ian at duckland.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 20:28 -0700, Mark Fischer wrote:
> > I'm having very poor quality tv from my pcHDTV 3000 card.
> > About my system:
> > AMD 3800+ X2 64 bit
> > 2x1GB PC3200 dual channel memory
> > 250gb SATA Hard Drive WD Caviar
> > pcHDTV 3000
> > Nvidia GeForce 6600 on PCI Express 16X
> > MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum mainboard
> >
> > I've been testing directly with mplayer like:  mplayer -nosound dvb://
> > I've tried all the -vo options. Of those that "work", the image is
> > highly pixelated and it seems to be rendering very slowly.  I believe
> > this has to the with the capture card because I've played back an HD
> > trailer of Pirates of the caribean with mplayer and it plays back
> > fine.
> >
> > My capture card is fed with a digital cable signal. I've read the wiki
> > on these topics:
> > http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Working_QAM_cable_layout
> > http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Adding_QAM_Channels_For_HDTV_Tuner_Cards
> >
> > azap output has sporatic loss of locks:
> >
> > status 1f | signal f758 | snr 217b | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal fa17 | snr 1995 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal f51b | snr 2204 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal f7c2 | snr 2197 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal f863 | snr 20e1 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal f5b5 | snr 216d | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 00 | signal f3b9 | snr 213d | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 |
> > status 1f | signal f582 | snr 21ee | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal f07c | snr 21f5 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal c7b0 | snr 2144 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 1f | signal f7f8 | snr 21f5 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
> > status 00 | signal f5b5 | snr 21e6 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 |
> >
> > and mplayer will sometimes reports errors like these:
> > a52: CRC check failed!
> > a52: CRC check failed!
> > a52: error at resampling
> > a52: CRC check failed!   10.304 ct:  0.037  22/ 22 20%  1% 1683.9% 22 0
> >
> > From what I've read, the standard channels are not encrypted (Comcast
> > in San Francisco).
> >
> > Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
>
> I've had similar problems with both an Athlon 64 3200+ and an Athlon 64
> 3800 X2.  Turns out that if I have *any* CPU load when recording, I get
> crapped-out recordings.  But if I capture then playback later, all works
> out fine.  There are notes in the list archives about this being caused
> potentially by power supplies, PCI latency, APIC, and various other
> things.  My suggestion would be to put the pcHDTV 3000 in a separate
> non-frontend, non-job-running system (something small and not very
> powerful, as CPU isn't needed to record) and call it a day... unless, of
> course, you find the source of the problem... ;)
>
>         -I
>
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>
thanks for the info. I've considered installing the i386 OS to see if
that would make a difference.  Has anyone tried this?