Brad Templeton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
|On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 03:48:54PM -0500, Dan Lanciani wrote:
|> Brad Templeton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
|>
|> |My own MythTV experience, as I noted, explains this. I got a pcHDTV
|> |got it working on its own then installed Myth. And the first thing I found
|> |was that it crashed to a black screen if you tuned the wrong channel.
|> |
|> |This took me back. I had heard Myth was some work to install, but
|> |crashing on a channel change was far worse than the expectations I had
|> |given. Had I not been dedicated to make it working, I can easily
|> |imagine stopping right there.
|>
|> How did you solve this problem?
|>
|
|This was a problem with the old releases.
I assume that 0.16 is "old" for these purposes (since it's the last thing
I looked at)?
|I believe with current software
|it still isn't great (the screen is still black rather than something
|that tells you what's going on) but after a while it gives up and returns
|you to where you were.
It appeared to me that the back end was giving a recording error almost
immediately on tuning to (or starting with) a channel with no signal. The
front end seemed to ignore this and hang. I suppose a timeout is better
than nothing, but taking heed of the error might make more sense.
|Ideally (though I have other priorities) it
|would pop up a little display saying "Tuning channel X, signal strenght yy%"
|and let the user hit a key to get out of it.
I don't think this would be ideal unless implemented in a rather roundabout
way (see below).
|But LiveTV is of very little interest to me, and most other PVR hardcores.
|You always try it out when first installing, of course.
Well, I guess I'm not a hardcore PVR person, but I'm pretty sure I'd use
it if I could. I base this assumption on the fact that I use the analogous
function with my off-the-shelf NTSC-only DVR.
|Far more troubling is the current behaviour for recording in this situation,
|which is to give up an entire recording if the signal strength isn't
|right at the start of the recording. That I'm more inclined to try to fix!
I can appreciate that you aren't interested in fixing functions that you
don't use; however, in this case, I think the problems are--at least in
an abstract sense--the same. The lower layers appear to treat the lack of
a signal on an ATSC source as a fatal error, perhaps on the same level as
a hardware failure of the tuner card. The upper layers do not seem to be
prepared to deal with such "soft hard" errors, presumably because the
condition did not exist for NTSC sources where you can happily view snow
from a dead station.
Rather than try to fix everything to deal with extra information that in
many cases isn't even useful (would you really want to abort a recording
even if the signal went away for a minute in the middle?) I would suggest
simply making ATSC sources act more like NTSC sources. If there is no
signal, just create a stream of blank frames. If you want to get fancy,
cons up an MPEG-encoded display with your suggested text. Although it
seems a bit of a kludge, it does more closely match our intuitive notion
of tuning a TV channel...
Of course, I still don't understand why the back end feels the need to
select (or in my case, fail to select) a station at startup and try
to get a signal strength reading. (Nor do I understand the meta-questions
of why it fails and why running dtvsignal works. :()
Dan Lanciani
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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