Hi Duncan! (I sent this mail this afternoon from work, but it did not make it to the list, probably due to the sending address.)
Am Mittwoch, 28. März 2007 08:43:44 schrieb Duncan Webb: > > 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 [...] > > 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. Ah, another reason why it would make sense for me to try again with a more recent kernel version. (Which is needed for ivtv-0.8+.) > > 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. Ah, vbi data. That's a hint. Alas, I tried with mplayer and that exhibited the same errors. Another reason could be nxtvepg, which I have running now since the end of January, which might as well be the point in time where the visual artifacts began. nxtvepg seems to be more well-tested with traditional v4l than with v4l2. BTW: The green blocks are within Xine only, right? And I think my blocks are not always green, but I will have to check that again. > 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). Hmm, that would be another idea for playback, right? But I have already tried the files with mplayer on several computers, so I am sure the problem is within the file. (The scart interface is not connected, and the computer is fit neatly into a furnature and not easy to access from behind... ;-/ ) > > 3.) [...] > > 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] think it is an ivtv > > problem. > > May be, the XMLTV data is not always correct. Are the truncated recording > happening over midnight? No, any time during the day and the EPG is fine (also I am now using nxtvepg). > 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. The logs looked fine to me, and as I wrote above, it looks as if Freevo believes that the recording is still in progress. I made some recordings this night and will check the logs for stop times again (last time I found only start times IIRC). > > 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 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 That's a very interesting hint, thanks. I will check and report back, maybe the Linux kernel sets different default PCI settings. Easy to check and I will try changing the HD values, too. > 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. My wife expressed the same feelings about a quality drop, but it's so hard to verify. :-( > 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. Did I understand you correctly? Can you reproduce problem number 4 I have? Sorry, but that's great! ;-)) It may take some time until I post an update about my findings. Thanks for your feedback so far. Ciao, / / /--/ / / ANS -- Ciao, / / .o. /--/ ..o / / ANS ooo ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freevo-devel mailing list Freevo-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-devel
