[mythtv-users] Problems with upgrade install

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Mon Sep 23 15:39:38 UTC 2013


Well, you could almost call it a new install, but not quite.

The problems with my sister's machine, now 10 years old, which took a 
zorch a couple months back, turned out to in fact have gotten past the
power supply onto the motherboard -- it actually worked remarkably well,
but XFS filesystem work was enough to confuse it and kick volumes off-line 
with the dreaded "I/O error 5 - Volume Unmounted" duo.

So it's been replaced now, at great danger to my paycheck, with an ASUS
M5A97 LE motherboard, an AMD FX4100 quadcore CPU, 2G of Kingston DDR3-1666,
and a Geforce 210 (since I told the Tigerdirect guy I needed motherboard
HDMI, and somehow ended up with a motherboard without it anyway).

Assembled all the parts, reconnected all the drives, did a (successful)
xfs_repair on the last volume with problems, and -- having already
installed 0.26 from RPM, loaded in the DB dump from the old .23 install,
and let both mythtv-setup and the front end do their respective schema
upgrades (which seems to have worked fine, but maybe not), I got to the
"let's see if it works stage".  And I have two problems.

1) Data Direct doesn't seem to be loading properly.

The channels table was one of the things brought forwards from the old 
install.  While the box was down, the cable system swapped our local 
channel 10 back from the channel 12 it had been on for years (don't ask)
to channel 10... and that was not reflected in the channel able, *even*
after I deleted all the capture cards (since only 2 of them were in the
new box for lack of PCI slots), and recreated them -- during which process
mythtv-setup told me it was pulling the lineup from Schedules Direct, and
I also did it myself, manually.

But with that channels table, I pulled in listings data, from the command
line, *not* using -dd-grab-all, and got, it told me, about 24000 new
firsts/lasts (sorry; I don't have that exact number).

At this point, we bring in problem...

2) In LiveTV, channels aren't tuning properly.

It's clear that I'm getting the right channel; I can see the programming
and the bugs, and such but each and every channel doesn't tune close
enough for either audio lock, or sync lock -- they look like the OTA
paid/scrambled channels used to back in the late 70s.

My last test on this last night was to tune Live, hit R, and then exit 
and repeat 3 times, on different channels -- and it knows it has 3
tuners (cause the fourth one was when I was told all tuners were busy),
and each reacts the same way.  (The tuners are a WinTV-PVR 250 and a 500
dual; older IVTV drivers had trouble with the 500, and we used to only
get one working tuner out of it, but as noted, it seems to be working
here, for sufficiently small values of "working".)

This feels like a tuning problem -- especially since it seems to get 
worse as I tune up the band; over about 16 I get mostly or entirely
mpeg-snow -- but I'm using the us-cable tuning pattern which Bright
House Tampa Bay actually says on their website I'm supposed to; they
do not use IRC or HRC.

The adjacent TV, and the TV at the other end of the house, both seem not
to have any signal problems -- or at least, any new ones; the Philips
32" next to it has always had a slight amount of patterned impairment
on channels *below* about 20, though the repeated OTA HD channels from
this market are pristine, and always have been; never a single MPEG 
dropout.

So, the next thing I did was to delete all channels and then do a
scan.  Which came up empty.  On all three tuners (which it knows it
has all of, there, too).

So I went back to -setup and asked it to refresh the lineup.  As always,
it said it was, and as always... it didn't; still no channels in the
list.

So at that point, with some pointers from Ray Wagner (thanks :-), I 
went to the commandline and did mfdb --only-do-channels.

*That* got me a channels table, and it was the right one -- WTSP was
on cable 10 where it belonged.

So I went and re-ran mfdb to pull in corrected program data.

And that time and since, I get no data at all (well, to speak of) -- 
even though it appears to be pulling down 2MB per day.

The latest mfdb run results are here:

  http://pastebin.com/9amyJsBH

and the dmesg data about the tuners on boot here:

  http://pastebin.com/9amyJsBH

lspci looks like this:

  http://pastebin.com/HsPi30sV

The two tuners are in the only two PCI slots on the motherboard, which, 
according to the manual, are slots 5 and 6; 5 shares IRQ E with the VGA 
card (in slot 1) and the LAN; 6 has IRQ F to itself.

Alas, I did not write down the tuner models when I installed the cards;
if they are necessary for diagnosis, I'll have to pull the cards back
out, if the lspci's aren't informative enough.

My abject thanks to anyone who's read this far, even if you don't have
any answers; my Sister Shotgun Factor is rising sharply as the last 
couple hours to the season tick away (I had to buy the replacement
parts for financial reasons, and I only finally got paid myself by
my Big Client on Friday, most of which was frittered away paying rent
and utilities and buying $900 worth of new tires... :-})

Cheers,
-- jra



-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list