[mythtv-users] firewire card

[Allan Wilson]

On 8/13/06, John P Poet <jppoet at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I originally tried hooking up my SA3250HD to my main mythbackend
> machine which has an on-board firewire controller.  While I got it to
> work to a point, the resulting captures where *HEAVILY* pixelated.
>
> I then tried hooking up the SA3250HD to my frontend machine, and
> started running the backend on that machine.  Much better.  Captures
> were 98% cleaner than they were with the firewire on the main backend.
>
> Unfortunately, whenever the firewire was actively being used to
> capture an HD stream, whatever I was watching would have audio
> drop-outs.  Thought I had it solved at one point, by adjusting the PCI
> latencies.  While adjusting the latency did seem to help, it did not
> solve the problem.
>
> The audio card in my frontend is an m-audio 410.  I decided to try my
> old Sound Blaster Live! card.  Much better -- the SB Live! did not
> have the drop-outs near as bad as the m-audio.
>
> The problem with the Sound Blaster Live!, is it only understand 48KHz.
> The reason I went away from it in the first play, is playing 44.1KHz
> music files did not sound as good as they should.  This was in
> comparison to my Turtle Beach Audiotron.  Switching to the m-audio 410
> resulted in a *very* noticeable improvement in sound quality with
> 44.1KHz material.
>
> So, I had a problem.  The SB Live! was better when the firewire was in
> use, but bad for music listening.  I decided to see if I could solve
> my problem with hooking the firewire up to the main backend.
>
> I figured it just had to be a cable or splitter problem with the coax.
> I ran a brand new piece of high quality Belden coax all the way from
> the street, right into my office where the backend was located.  I
> hooked this coax right into the SA3250HD box.  It made no difference.
> Captures were still so pixelated, that it would actually cause the
> test-mpeg2 app to segfault.
>
> Only thing left that could cause the problem was the firewire port.  I
> called up a friend, and asked to borrow is PCI add on card.  Problem
> solved.  Wish I had done that to begin with -- running that coax took
> a couple of hours!
>
> The card I borrowed was just a generic 4-port firewire using a TI chipset.
>
> John
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Thanks for the post that is one of those good pieces of information to know.

Allan
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