> Hi! > > Sorry for asking here, but I have the problem that my Freevo/ivtv living > room > system is not suitable anymore for normal daily use. (Since I became > father > very recently, my time is rather limited ATM, and I already spent a fair > amount on this stupid problem. My wife is angry since she cannot follow > her > favorite series anymore and I cannot live with the fact that I am not even > in > control of our computers.)
Congratulations Hans, Just wait until the baby is old enough to press buttons, then you realy don't know if it is a computer error or a user error. :) > Actually, I have lots of problems with ivtv, let's list them > chronologically: > > 1.) Often, a TV program is broadcasted with a second channel for blind > people, > narrating what happens on screen. Such recordings are recorded here with > both channels mixed into each other - I was told* that this was because of > my "options msp3400 once=1" module option, but removing that did not help > and > I still have that problem. However, this only affects special programs, > so > it is not as grave as the following problems. > * http://ivtvdriver.org/pipermail/ivtv-users/2006-August/003943.html IIRC the ivtv-0.8 and above correctly separates the audio channels and so I wrote the bilingual plug-in so you can choose with channel to listen to. BTW The setting of 12000 is a bit high, 8000 is a good max. In fact, I leave everything at the default values. The only thing I would ever change is the bit rates to reduce the file size. > 2.) For around ten weeks, we have been having bad artifacts in our > recordings, > similar to DVB-T errors during bad wheather for example. I mean every > some > minutes (sometimes even seconds) there are visible blocky structures in > some > frames. I cannot remember when or why this appeared first (possibly after > installing ivtv-0.4.2), but I think this was the original reason why I > fiddled around with the system, which led to the following problems.. > First > I checked that this was no Freevo problem by recording (/playing) directly > from /dev/video0, which also showed the problem so I decided to upgrade > ivtv. xine and embedded vbi data does not work well together, mplayer has no problem with vbi. The top third of the screen shows green blocks. The best way to chack this is to push the mpeg file into /dev/video16 and see what comes out of the scart interface (PVR-350 only, which your using). > 3.) With ivtv-0.4.10 (still Linux-2.6.15.2, as above) and a recent > Freevo-1.7 > (yes, unfortunately I updated Freevo at the same time, which makes it hard > to > nail down the cause of any problems), I now have the problem that > scheduled > recordings end prematurely. That is - a program with 90 minutes might end > after 34 or only 11 minutes. Freevo shuts down (using the autoshutdown > plugin) after the correct time, i.e. it "waits" the rest of the time > without > the recorded file growing any more. I successfully tried manual > recordings > from /dev/video0, but the problem is hard to reproduce, since sometimes a > full recording from Freevo is OK, too, so I still think it is an ivtv > problem. May be, the XMLTV data is not always correct. Are the truncated recording happening over midnight? You may be able to see something in the recordserver log, it should report the start and stop times and if the recording has been killed by freevo. > 4.) In parallel, I tried Linux-2.6.20.1 (I have the same kernel running > successfully on several other computers) with ivtv-0.10.1. Here, the > recordings are not fluent, but every half a second to second, the video > stops > which makes all movements appear jerky. The audio is fine though. I > planned > to post more information by analyzing the stream, but my wife deleted all > recordings and the system is currently booted into the older kernel. I saw something in the mythtv wiki about setting PCI latencies for the hard disk, this may help to ensure that the hard disk has sufficient response for recordings. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/PCI_Latency > I wonder which kernel/ivtv combos you are using and whether any one of you > has > (had) similar problems. Or is it just that I have bad luck, or that the > evil > devil decided to steal my last minutes of "spare" time I have? I must say that as far as I can see there haven't been any real improvements with the ivtv driver. I sort of have the feeling that the quality has dropped a bit with later versions. I'm pretty sure that recent recordings do not have quite the same quality as older recordings. But this could be because I have swapped the PVR-350 for a 500. The 350 is now in my test machine and I don't watch anything that I have recorded there. Having said this I did copy a couple of recordings across to the main machine and they were as jumpy as hell. Trouble is, since the cable company removed BBC prime I hardly ever watch TV but record the same program for the gf but she may watch it a month later so it's difficult to say when something started to go wrong. Duncan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. 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