[mythtv-users] mythtv/pvr350/australia

[Brian May]

I am experimenting with mythtv with a PVR-350 card/PAL, Australia.

Debian/unstable.
Latest stable version of everything, except infra-red stuff.

I have currently got everything working, including TV-in, TV-out,
and remote control. When it works, it is very good. In fact, picture
quality is better then with my VCR tuner (something dodgy here, but
obviously not related to mythtv).

However, I am having random problems, ranging from serious to
minor:

* When watching TV for approx 30 minutes or more, I often get hard system
lock-ups, and the computer has to be rebooted. This only
seems to occur when receiving TV (it also occured without TV-out,
when displaying on a computer monitor). It is not reproducible on demand.

(possibly the above problems are related to suspicious messages I
occasionaly get in kern.log like:
Mar 12 12:06:17 localhost kernel: ivtv: DMA read error. Result=0x00000002)

* Sometimes the TV card "crashes", and while the computer is still OK,
I can't update the TV display without a reboot. Restarting X doesn't
help. This seems to be connected when displaying the TV program guide.
When I just tried displaying the (semi-transparent) program guide, 1st
try, TV picture freezes and wont restart. 2nd try same. 3rd try no
response. Nothing logged in /var/log/debug, /var/log/kern.log or
/var/log/mythbackend.log.  Seems to be reproducable on demand.

* Occassionally on rare occasions, the computer enters suspend mode for
no good reason.  I suspect this is related to the video card (nv). the
harddisk spins down, and I have to plug a keyboard in and push any key
to resume. It was worse when using the non-free nv drivers, now I have
removed all references to nv in my XFree86-4 file, to see if this helps.
Not reproducible on demand.

* The on screen display is too big. I found adjustments to change the
size of the menus, etc, but the OSD is still too big when watching TV
shows. Is there any reason why? How do I fix this?

* Most of the time, I get sound perfectly. However, on some reboots
I don't get sound, and must manually run "/usr/local/bin/test_ioctl -v
input=7,output=1" after changing channels. Why is this so unpredictable?

* TV Guide (Australia/Melbourne) seems to have some gross errors in it,
this confused me because looking up the guide on au.tv.yahoo.com (the
source for tv_grab_au), it looked correct. eg. Last Friday I tried
recording James Bond which ended at 11:30pm (approx) but mythtv thought
it was Ricki Lake which ended at 10:30pm. I suspect this means it would
have stopped recording at 10:30pm (actually it crashed due to the first (or
second?) problem at 10:20pm). Other times I see one hour shows last all
night (as far as Mythtv is concerned).

* Even then, I don't know how the program will work in practise, because
times given in TV guides are never accurate, with programs constantly starting
late and ending late. Is it possible to manually start recording *now" and
manually stop recording *now* like on a VCR?

* TV-in picture constantly shakes slightly up and down by 1 or 2 pixels,
consistantly. Otherwise, the picture would be perfect.

* I tried to configure channel 37 (for my VCR). ptune-ui.pl will switch
to 37 fine, without any problem. mythtv wont let me select 37, even when I have
the details in the database. Channel 35 works fine, but not 37. I am not sure
what the problem is here.

* It seems to be easy to crash mythbackend; One very reproducible
way to crash it is to enter mythtv without any channels defined...
I have crashed it other times, but not yet found any obvious reasons.

* mythvideo doesn't work, mplayer complains the fb XServer doesn't have xv
extensions. What are xv extensions?

* Volume control doesn't work. I don't particularly care.

* 2 second delay when changing channels; I suspect this is the
time it takes to for the MPEG encoder/decoder to catch up.

Anyway, is anyone able to help with any of the above issues?

Alternatively, is there anything I can do to provide further information
to help debugging?

I apologize if any of these are common problems or this list seems too
long, I know I found some messages on the OSD size in the archives, but
I was attempting to debug another issue at the time, and can't find it
anymore :-(.

Thanks in advance.
-- 
Brian May <bam at snoopy.apana.org.au>