[mythtv-users] DVBSky S952 or TBS 6902 or neither

[John]

On 14/01/2020 10:31, Paul Gardiner wrote:
> On 14/01/2020 10:19, Paul Gardiner wrote:
>> On 13/01/2020 14:35, John wrote:
>>> On 13/01/2020 12:21, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 13 Jan 2020 11:44:15 +0000, you wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>> I'm looking to replace an old Haupauge Single tuner PCI card with 
>>>>> a Dual
>>>>> tuner PCIe card. Can anyone recommend either of the above for use 
>>>>> with
>>>>> MythTV? My old Haupauge card, although not perfect has been 
>>>>> working for
>>>>> many years, with regular kernel updates, using the built in 
>>>>> drivers, so
>>>>> I don't want the backward step of having to explicitly build drivers
>>>>> each kernel update, hence the neither possibility.
>>>> The TBS6902 is a fairly new card so it uses a newer chipset and needs
>>>> the V4L based TBS drivers.  So you would have to compile them for each
>>>> kernel update.
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>>>
>>> I am currently using a DVBSky S950 V3 which has behaved faultlessly 
>>> for 5 years.
>>>
>>> I have tried both the DVBSky S952v3 and the TBS6902 and have had 
>>> occasional bad recordings from both. (First tuning after power on 
>>> failing.)
>>>
>>> The DVBSky cards are supported in the kernel.
>>
>> Thank you both. That's exactly the sort of information I was hoping 
>> for. The S950C seems to still be available, which apparently uses the 
>> same chips. Looks to be the same card, but with a CI Common Interface 
>> Slot. Only a single tuner, but PCIe and increased reliability was 
>> mainly what I was looking for.
>
> Actually no. Looks like I picked up an old web link or narrowly missed 
> getting the last one in stock.
>
> John, with the S952v3, are you saying, it sometimes doesn't power up 
> in a working state, but if it does it remains stable?
>
> Cheers,
>     Paul.
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I never got to the bottom of why the dual card was unreliable. Possibly 
just a faulty card. Worked 95% of the time so could never track the 
issue down.

The following helped

     The dual TBS6952 takes 10 secs from boot to start - extending 
device timeouts to 10 secs improved start up reliability.

    Putting statements like this in mythbackend.service to make systemd 
wait for the card to start did not help

         Wants=dev-dvb-adapter0-frontend0.device
         After=dev-dvb-adapter0-frontend0.device

     Normally if you have multiple cards and therefore need to control 
the device numbers you would use Udev rules to control these as 
described in https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Device_Filenames_and_udev .

I found the Alternatives to udev for naming for DVB cards (The 
adapter_nr module option) much better -- see the last entry in the wike 
page.

Using version 31 (current master) of Mythtv may also help as the DVB 
setup and device handling is much improved.

Note I currently use a TBS6950 in conjunction with a WinTV-dualHD both 
of which are rock solid.


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