[mythtv] LiveTV on HVR-4000 not working- 0.22/F12

Michael PARKER michael.parker at st.com
Tue Apr 20 16:06:28 UTC 2010


Judging by the lack of response, I'm assuming the following mail to be outside the scope of the users list. Hence the  repost on the dev list.

I would *really* appreciate any help anyone can give me on this one - my Mythbox development has ground to a halt until I can watch and record TV :o(

Thanks,

Mike

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All,

Having spent the last five evenings trying unsuccessfully to get LiveTV working on my F12/0.22 platform, I've now run out of ideas and need to ask for help.

I'm trying to watch LiveTV in Myth, fed from my VirginMedia STB via the RF input of the analogue tuner of my Hauppauge HVR-4000 card. Mplayer works fine, finding the STB output on channel 21/471.25MHz. Both of the following mplayer command lines allow me to watch TV, albeit without sound:

mplayer -v tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:normid=4:channel=21
mplayer -v tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:normid=4:freq=471.25

When I try to watch LiveTV in Myth, I setup the capture card up as a V4L analogue capture card, a dummy "no grabber" video source and the input connection is setup to preset the tuner to channel 21. Since I've yet to sort out any channel change script, I just use /bin/echo to see what Myth thinks it's changing the STB channel to. My MythTV default video format/normid is PAL-I which corresponds to the "4" used by mplayer.

When I try to watch LiveTV in mythfrontend, I get "snow" with a green vertical line to the RHS of the screen (see screenshot below). This looks distinctly similar to the output I see when I deliberately mis-tune mplayer to the wrong channel/frequency.

Reviewing the FE/BE logs (with all debug verbose logging options enabled, see below for URLs), nothing seems amiss - Myth seems to believe that everything is fine and that I'm happily watching TV. Likewise the output of lspci, lsmod & dmesg (see below for URLs) all look OK - albeit to my untrained eye.

So in summary - everything looks fine, except I can't watch TV!

NB. I also can't record TV. Having seen reports of people being able to record but not watch LiveTV, I thought I'd try recording. No luck - I just get 5mins of snow with a vertical green line :o(

FWIW, I've installed firmware v1.23.86.1 for the HVR-4000's cx24116 DVB-S2 demod, which is successfully picks up. I also tried compiling up the latest v4l-dvb drivers to no effect. Since I experienced the same problem I reverted back to the kernel-supplied drivers.

My best guess is some form of driver issue - given the similarity of what I'm seeing to a mis-tuned mplayer, could Myth be passing the incorrect frequency to the tuner? Maybe a factor of 1e3/1e6 out? (I notice that mplayer talks in terms of MHz, MythTV initially in terms of KHz with a subsequent conversion to Hz).

Is there any way of seeing exactly what Myth passes to the tuner in the way of parameters?

Should I be concerned that mplayer uses the v4l2 driver whilst Myth seems to use the cx8800 driver? (A review of lsmod appears to suggest that cx8800 calls v4l2 anyway, but I thought I'd mention it).

I'm really at the end of my tether with this one. I've passed it by another guy here at work who has extensive personal experience of Myth but, other than supporting my theory of some form of driver issue, he can't suggest much else to try.

Any help (very) gratefully received,

Mike

PS. I started seeing this issue on 0.23RC2. Thinking that colelctive experience of 0.23RC was likely to be limited, I reverted back to 0.22 secretly hoping the issue was down to 0.23. No such luck - both 0.22 and 0.23RC2 repeatably show the same bahaviour.

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BE_log.txt:	http://tinyurl.com/y45c63x
FE_log.txt: http://tinyurl.com/y67zz67
lspci.txt: 	http://tinyurl.com/y5h3n68
lsmod.txt:	http://tinyurl.com/y44vgof
dmesg.txt: 	http://tinyurl.com/y34ut6m
screenshot:	http://tinyurl.com/y2q9aon



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