[mythtv-users] Terrible live TV experience with HD-PVR

[Larry Finger]

On 02/16/2013 11:52 AM, Ron Garrison wrote:

> It is an airstar PCI device that has worked fine with the HD-PVR in
> previous versions (.22-fixes) of MythTV.  This appears to me to be a
> functional or race condition issue in .26-fixes.  Perhaps a frontend
> issue with VDPAU and switching.  I really haven't investigated very
> much yet, other than the previous poster seemed to describe the exact
> same symptoms that I am seeing.

The HD-PVR may have little to do with the problem. I have a PVR500 and a WinTV 
USB2, both from Hauppauge. Under version 0.21, all 3 tuners were controlled by 
MythTV and everything worked well. The system is used for a lot of Live TV. I 
particularly like the option of pausing when necessary, or of replaying when you 
miss something.

For reasons not related to MythTV, I needed to upgrade the kernel on that 
system; however I reached a point where kernel builds failed because the gcc 
version was too old. To solve that problem, I upgraded my openSUSE version and 
switched to 0.24-fixes from the git repo. Immediately, the WAF plummeted because 
changing the channel under Live TV would freeze and eventually return a video 
buffering error. The same error resulted whether I was using either one of the 
PCI-based tuners, or the USB version for live TV. As I had read this ML and knew 
that fixing Live TV had no priority, I sought a workaround.

I removed the USB tuner from MythTV control and added a new Live TV main menu 
item that starts tvtime on that tuner. Once I did that, the WAF was restored. 
Unfortunately, tvtime is just a dumb TV, but I no longer have to listen to my 
Windows-centric spouse blasting Linux every time it glitched.

Larry