[mythtv-users] PVR-250 success and PVR-350 failure (long!)

[Blues Guy]

The preface:

First off, I want to thank Axel for his excellent
RPMS, Jarod for his excellent FC1 howto, the members
of this list for all the excellent information, the
myth developers for a *very* polished project, and all
the developers of all the drivers for countless hours
of hard work.  I wouldn't have even tried this without
you!  I built a complete mythtv .13 box in a weekend
without compiling a thing, entirely from binary rpm's.
 That's beautiful!

I'll start with my question first (before I start
rambling), and then give the details.  

Question:

Does anyone have both a PVR-250 and PVR-350 working
together in a Pundit, using the 350's tv-out for both
X and TV?  (preferably NTSC) If so, is it stable, and
how'd you do it?

Long story: (Sorry for the huge post, but hopefully
this will help the next person as much as the previous
posts have helped me!)

So for christmas I decided to treat myself by building
a myth box.  As a longtime linux user, I was up to the
challenge, and from reading this mailing list for a
while, it seemed that myth .13 was stable enough, so I
installed Fedora Core 1 in vmware, tested out the myth
install, learned what I really needed to know, and
decided to go for it.  So I bought a pundit and 2
PVR-250 cards.  Mostly following Jarod's guide, I
installed and setup the system and everything worked
great.  I did a smaller install than he recommended,
and I only used xfwm4 which is easier and smaller than
the fullblown KDE install.  In fact I could fit the
whole system (with all of myth) on a 1GB Compact Flash
and remote mount /mnt/store if I wanted to, so as to
make a VERY quiet machine, but that's a story for
another day... if you're interested and in a hurry,
e-mail me, but I'll share my lessons learned in
another post, this one's long enough!

So anyway, I got the system working great, ran it for
2 weeks straight solid uptime, recorded ~150GB's of
TV, and everything was flawless.  Not an error or bug
to be had.  Rock solid; No oops, no reboot, no
mythfrontend segfault! (ok, maybe just one)  I could
record two shows at the same time, and watch a third
pre-recorded show, all at the same time and it worked
great!  The only dissapointment was the pundit onboard
tv-out quality, due to having to use myth's software
de-interlace option to compensate for the pundit's
tv-out being already hardware de-interlaced.  (What
were the SIS engineers thinking?)  But since things
went so well with the 250's I decided to get a PVR-350
and replace one of them, to use the PVR-350's properly
interlaced, and thus better quality, output.


The important part: (please correct me if I'm wrong
here!)

So I put the new card in the pundit's bottom slot (I
wanted it be /dev/video0 so I didn't have to
reconfigure as much), modified /etc/modules.conf to
include the ivtv-fb module, replaced my XF86Config,
and rewired so the audio and video were from the
PVR-350 outputs.  For the most part I followed the TV
OUT HowTo
(http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-print.php?page=TvOutHowto)
which was based on an old post to this list.  It took
a little tinkering, because AFAIK, it's not documented
anywhere what modules the 350 needs, vs. the 250. 
(the saa7127 vs. saa7115 bit me in the a**), but after
some finageling, I got a beautiful picture and great
sound!  There was no going back to the pundit video
now!  I changed a few channels, paused tv, and
then...lock.  The machine was still alive, I could SSH
in and do whatever, but the framebuffer image was
frozen.  /var/log/messages really didn't show much. 
The ivtv-fb module doesn't seem to rmmod, so I
rebooted and tried again, and randomly (but quickly),
it would lock everytime.

Relevant info:

I upgraded the ivtv drivers to 0.1.7 when I added the
PVR-350, because I wanted the most recent framebuffer
driver (mistake?).  I had been using the version that
was in ATrpms prior to that with the .2135 kernel. 
That somewhat forced me to switch to Axel's latest
kernel (2.4.22-1.2140.nptl_30.rhfc1.at) because I
wanted to use his rpms, so I then upgraded all the
relevent kmdl's as well (alsa, lirc, ivtv).  This all
went fine.

Only live tv seems to cause this problem.  Playback of
the old stuff that I recorded (from when I had the 2
PVR-250's in) works perfectly. (pause, ff, etc.)  No
problems.  Even recording a show and then watching it
as it's recording works ok.  Only live TV seems to
lock up, almost as if it's the tuner part that causing
the problem, because changing the channels will lock
it up within 3 or 4 channel changes, but if I leave it
on one channel and don't do anything (no pause, rew,
ff, etc.), it'll work for as long as I've tested (~60
minutes)  Of course it could also be the hardware
decoder.

Oddly, I can't get a color output from the s-video out
on either the PVR-350 or the pundit video.  This is
*very* strange, because prior to the upgrade, I was
using the pundit's s-video out and it worked
perfectly.  This leads me to believe there may be some
kind of hardware conflict, but I've tried turning off
various resources in the BIOS (firewire, USB, PCMCIA,
etc) and nothing seems to help.  Unfortunately the
pundit won't boot when you disable the onboard VGA. 
I'd like to be able to try this to see what happens...

If I run X on the pundit's video, and just the TV out
on the 350, (without the ivtv-fb module) it seems to
be stable.  This configuration doesn't work for me
though, because I need my myth box to do both.

/var/log/messages doesn't show much, even with
ivtv_debug turned to 1.  I have noticed errors, but
they are the same one's I was getting when I had both
250's in, and those worked flawlessly (albeit with the
older driver).  For the record, the errors look like
this:

insmod:
/lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2140.nptl_30.rhfc1.at/kernel/drivers/media/video/bttv.o:
init_module: No such device
insmod: Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect
module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ
parameters.       You may find more information in
syslog or the output from dmesg
insmod:
/lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2140.nptl_30.rhfc1.at/kernel/drivers/media/video/bttv.o:
insmod bttv failed

and this:

kernel: ivtv: ivtv-api.c: unknown ioctl 0x803c7601
kernel: ivtv: ivtv-api.c: unknown ioctl 0x803c7601
modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module
char-major-81-2

I'm not sure why it's trying to load bttv, but again,
it did that before and it didn't cause a problem, so
I'm ignoring it.

Does anyone know what the char-major-81-2 is in
reference to?!?  It seems to be Myth calling for it...

When the video locks, I usually won't get an error. 
But occassionaly when it's running I'd get an error
like:

kernel: ivtv: DEC: Got DMA-done, not expecting one
kernel: ivtv: DMAP not set
kernel: ivtv: DMA read error. Result=0x00000002

and sometimes

kernel: ivtv: 100 ms time out waiting for firmware
kernel: ivtv: api call 0x000000c9
kernel: ivtv: init error 1. Code -16

I never got any of these 6 errors with the 2
PVR-250's.

For what it's worth, I've published my config files
here, in case it helps:
http://blues.gotdns.org/myth/modules.conf.html
http://blues.gotdns.org/myth/syslog-pvr250-good.html
http://blues.gotdns.org/myth/syslog-pvr350-errors.html
http://blues.gotdns.org/myth/XF86Config.html


Could it be something simple in my modules.conf, or
maybe I should compile and try a newer version of
ivtv? (1.8)

On the ivtv lists, DMA issues were mostly attributed
to Via chipsets, but the Pundit uses SiS chipsets.   I
haven't gone as far as this guy,
(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=6865797)
but I have tried a variety things with no luck, so I
turn to the list that got me to a successful system in
the first place.  Could it be the hardware decoder,
and if so, is it possible to get myth to use the 350's
tv-out without using the decoder?  I've got plenty of
CPU (2.0GHZ) to do the decoding, but I can't go back
to the pundit video after tasting the PVR-350's!  Any
ideas?

Sorry for the long post, and thanks again for all the
help!

Greg

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