[mythtv-users] MythTV and PVR150's Anyone?

[Jeffrey Preston]

I have been using Mythbuntu for several years now. I have two P4 systems
with 875 based boards, with 2 Gig of memory. One processor is 3.4Ghz, and
the other is 3.2GHz. One system has three (3) PVR150's and the other
contains 2 ATi HDTV Wonder cards, and one PC HDTV 5500 card. The analog
cards are in a slave backend, and the digital cards are in the master. The
digital cards work well with Mythbuntu 11.04. Loading 11.10 results in a
hung system at boot. The PVR-150's in the first system is what I am having
trouble with. When I load 11.04 and configure the three PVR-150's, the
resulting analog stations that are tuned, about 80% of the time, result in
video that is distorted, jumping, with freezing and stuttering. Once the
distortion starts, about 25% of the time, I get either the error "Error
opening jump program file" or "Video frame buffering failed too many times".
Has anyone else seen this issue with analog tuners?  Is this issue only with
MPEG-2 encoder cards?

I have tried tuning a digital station first (on the master), as suggested by
one of the MythTV bug tracking reports. Maybe this will not work for me, as
the digital cards are in a separate system.

I have tried disabling HyperThreading on my P4 - no change.

I have tried running the backend booted to a text only mode - no change.

I have tried updates in the 0.24.1 fixes branch, up until 3 or 4 weeks ago -
no change.

I have tried loading Mythdora 12.23 (MythTV version 0.23) and it resulted in
a 100% working system with perfect video, but when I applied updates, and
updated MythTV to 0.24, attempting to tune ANY analog station resulted in a
hung frontend. Sooooooooooooooo, close.

On a whim, I tried loading Ubuntu 11.04, and then used Synaptic to load the
MythTV modules, and it resulted in a working system, with perfect video on
all of my PVR-150's. I could change channels over a dozen times before I ran
into any kind of trouble. But I got absolutely no distorted video. Instead,
about every dozen or so channel changes, I get a long pause on the frontend,
and then I see the main menu with the error message "Video frame buffering
failed too many times.". And that is fairly consistent - the engineer in me
likes consistency. I have not applied updates or loaded the fixes branch yet
- should I? I would like to isolate the problem first, but the only tools I
have is a persistent attitude and my hardware engineering background. 

I would prefer to stick with Ubuntu, as it is what I know. Does anyone have
any suggestions, what to try next? 

One last note, is that Mythbuntu 8.10 works perfectly on my analog tuners,
but I cannnot use version 8.10 any longer, as it will not be supported much
longer, and I need to run later versions of MythTV for the VDPAU support on
my remote front ends.

Thanks to all for any help.

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