[mythtv-users] FC4 Alsa Question

[Yan-Fa Li]

Folks,

Any one seeing any performance regression with the snd_cs46XX driver
with the latest redhat 2.6.14-1.1644_FC4 released kernel and nvidia
8174 livna driver ?  I had to revert back to 2.6.14-1.1637_FC4 and the
7174 driver because I was experiencing buffer underrun issues while
watching TV and recordings using mythfrontend.

Thanks In Advance

Yan
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[mythtv-users] Zap2it subscription notices ?

[Yan-Fa Li]

Folks,

my sub runs out on 9/9 and I haven't seen any renewal requests.  I
logged into my account, but there doesn't seem to be  a way to
renew pre-emptively.  Anyone else seen this in North America ?

Thanks

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] good mATX socket 754 mobo

[Yan-Fa Li]

On Apr 1, 2005 11:27 AM, Andrew Kreps <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Apr 1, 2005 11:06 AM, Micah Wedemeyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > So, I'm thinking of moving to a mATX board with a Sempron.  I want a good 
> > board
> > with S-Video out and oboard sound.  I also want to stay away from a VIA 
> > chipset,
> > since the whole Epia thing has soured me towards VIA.
> 
> Don't let the EPIA cause you to rule out VIA as a chipset altogether.
> They make some of the most solid AMD chipsets on the market.  A
> KT600/KT800 or KM400 would be a nice choice, and most of the AMD
> compatible motherboards out there run on one of those.

I've run Nvidia NForce3 boards from MSI and they are rock solid under
Linux.  The NForce3 250GB is the model to look for, earlier models had
some limitations with Hyper Transport speeds.  If you have a bit more
money invest in a NForce3 Ultra to get Socket 939 compatiblity and
higher memory bandwidth.  This will probably help if you upgrade to
HDTV.  NForce4 is out now, but will force you to buy PCI Express video
cards today rather than later.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] anyone use S3 Savage 2000 card?

[Yan-Fa Li]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 07:09:18 -0800, Ricardo Kleemann
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Anyone have experience with this card? It has tv-out. Just wondering if it's
> a good card for mythtv
>

Haven't used one of these in quite a while.  Last time I checked
XVideo support was 16bit only.
 
> Thanks
> Ricardo
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Re: [mythtv-users] alsactl restore and Jarod's guide

[Yan-Fa Li]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 22:31:55 -0500, Bill Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> Not to sound dense, but other than seeing if the sound settings are
> correct, how would I determine if it ran? I know the /etc/rc.local is at
> least being run as the other commands are working. no idea about the KDE
> startup script as the sound settings restore is the only command there.
> 
> -Bill

Easy peasy.  It's just a shell script so add a

set -x to the first line of the script.  This should force bash to
print diagnostics when it runs.
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Re: [mythtv-users] alsactl restore and Jarod's guide

[Yan-Fa Li]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:18:29 -0500, Bill Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> >
> Yup, I have it there too. Still no-go.
> 
> -Bill

Bill could you reproduce your /etc/rc.local on the mailing list ?
One thing you need to do is make sure the command is full path. 
Relative paths are not guaranteed to work from system shell scripts. 
Also, if your alsa layer isn't initialized yet it won't work either. 
Try adding a modprobe snd-card-driver before the alsactl.  FC3 is
supposed to start up the sound driver though so I don't think this
would be your problem.

e.g. /usr/sbin/alsactl restore

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Dieing Hard Drive

[Yan-Fa Li]

Nathan,
This tool costs money ($89), it's DOS based, but friends of mine have 
recovered data from extremely screwed up drives:

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
It's still cheaper than a data recovery service.  You'll have to judge 
for yourself how important your data is.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] MythVideo database resetting itself afteraddingsecond frontend

[Yan-Fa Li]

Darren Richards wrote:
How can I have different settings for the different frontends?
make them run a script, which is different on each machine but on the 
path of both.  Something like

mplayer.sh
Which internally calls mplayer with parameters supplied plus your 
customizations.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Is xfs flaky or is it my drive. Fedora Core 2, XFS, Myth .16 and .17

[Yan-Fa Li]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I have a myth box about 6 months old.  Fedora Core 2, new 200GB drive 
myth .16 and .17.

I have the 200GB drive in a volume group for expansion, and its setup 
XFS for /video.  I run ok for a few days, then I'm watching something 
and it stops in the middle, check the logs and I'm getting XFS errors. 
 Stop myth, unmount, xfs_check.. problems get fixed and I run ok for a 
few days.  Then the problem reoccur.

So my questions to the great users of myth..
- Are people using XFS and finding it generally stable or flaky like I 
find it?
Been fairly stable for me for the last 6 months or so.  Brand new drives 
sometimes have a few bad sectors in the first few months of operation in 
my experience.  A sector reallocation tends to fix it.

- What are people using as the file system for /video and are you 
happy/unhappy?
- Do I need to pull this thing apart and do a surface test on the drive?
Before doing that why don't you use smartctl (part of smartmontools) and
try and run an extended test:
smartctl -t long /dev/hd[a-z]
and see wether it passes or not.  If it does then try running a surface 
test on the drive using the appropriate disk from the vendor.  However, 
be warned sometimes this drives the disk over the edge and makes it 
fail, so if you have another disk copy your data over first.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] the ultimate setup

[Yan-Fa Li]

Jeff Wormsley wrote:
Expensive, but I like my A-Tech 3000 case (black with silver 
buttons/Powermate).

http://www.atechfabrication.com/
HOLY SCHNIKE!  $650 for just the case!!!  This is like the Ferrari 
Moderna of cases...  Beautiful work though.  I'm guessing you dropped 
about $1K on your case alone.  Do tell :D

Jeff.
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Re: [mythtv-users] parts list

[Yan-Fa Li]

Buddy Taylor wrote:
How about
ENERMAX Noisetaker 370W EG375P-VE-SFMA $43.99
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=17-103-444&depa=0
I'll know how quiet it is soon - I ordered one a couple of days ago.
-buddy
Enermax is ok.  They test funny.  Apparently the pot they use on the 
adjustable fan causes some weird feedback into the power fed into the 
motherboard, making it less smooth than it could be.  However, Enermax 
is guarenteed to be better than the 400W power supply shipping in most 
$40 cases. :D

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Re: [mythtv-users] parts list

[Yan-Fa Li]

Bryce wrote:
Comments? Any recommendation for a decent, quiet, psu for somewhere
between $40-60?
That's pretty low dollar value for a *quiet* power supply.  If you want 
quiet, in general you have to pay for it.  On the high end is Antec with 
the Phantom 350 (140USD), completely fanless.  A PC Power Cooling 
Silencer 360W will run you $65; though you could conceivably run using a 
310W which is cheaper still.  An antec true power 330 which is an *ok* 
power supply goes for as low as $55.  Antec and PPC are the only power 
supplies I use regularly, I'm sure others will chime in with more 
recommendations.

The physical weight of the power supply is an indication of it's quality 
in most cases.  My new PPC 470W Silencer weighs in at just over 4lbs.

Thanks for all the input!
Your welcome.
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] OT - Linux Kernel 2.6.11 released

[Yan-Fa Li]

Jarod Wilson wrote:
On Wednesday 02 March 2005 14:32, Preston Crow wrote:
Any chance it also has ivtv drivers for PVR-250 cards?

Also seems to hang during udev initialization on redhat 3.
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] is my processor to blame? (lockups, problems with FF and REW)

[Yan-Fa Li]

Chris Ribe wrote:
I run mythbackend on FC3 with a 1 GHz P3 and a pinnacle capture card,
and the system is generally unstable.  I generally run my front end on
a 400 Mhz PII running KnoppMyth, and that system is more stable.
I know this isn't terribly helpful, but I often run other apps (mostly
firefox and bittorrent) while mythbackend is running, and I get a lot
of system crashes.
What I'm trying to say is, I don't believe FC3 is a terribly stable OS.


Semi agree, unless you run atrpms, in which case I would disagree.  All 
the FC3 systems I'm running have been marvelous.  One issue is the lack 
of support for multilib systems in apt-get, so AMD64 doesn't get no 
lovin if you're running mixed mode code.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] is my processor to blame? (lockups, problems with FF and REW)

[Yan-Fa Li]

Aaron Aguilar wrote:
First off thanks so much to this list and to Jared for helping me set
up a working mythtv box.  My setup:
AMD Duron 650Mhz
384mb RAM
Samsung 160GB HDD
FX5200
Hauppauge PVR250
FC3 2.6.10kernel
Ugh.  It could be so many things.  Are you running a VIA chipset ?  Have 
you checked the Capacitors on your board lately and are they leaking 
(Brown Goo) ?  Do you have a decent power supply ?  Have you checked the 
RAM lately with Memtest86 ?

So many ways your system could be borked.  It's possible you are 
triggering some weird race condition in myth due to a low-end cpu, but 
apparently people have run myth on PIIs so I doubt it.  That's a fairly 
slow piece of gear these days.  $99 bucks gets you a Sempron 2200 with 
motherboard if you shop around.

I have myth running on a P3 933 quite well as a front end.  Last time I 
had problems with the IVTV and a system it was because I had bad 
capacitors.  Pulled it all and replaced it with a nforce2/sempron. 
Since then I fixed the bad caps on the old board and it runs reliably as 
a windows box.  Haven't tested mythtv on it again.

Good luck,
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Problems with installing apt

[Yan-Fa Li]

Carl Reynolds wrote:
When I run rpm -qa, I get a lot of duplicate packages with the same 
version number. Should I remove these packages? If I use rpm -e 
packagename, will it remove both packages or just the first one it gets to?

Carl.

Use the -f option on apt-get while updating and/or dist-upgrade.  This 
usually fixes it.  If that doesn't work you'll have to fall back to 
manually deleting the bad entries, or you could try rebuilding your 
entire rpm db.

Yan
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[mythtv-users] Cheap WinTV-GO Tuner cards

[Yan-Fa Li]

FYI, looks like the WinTV Tuner cards are being dumped at low prices, 20USD:
http://www.softwareandstuff.com/CRD10186.html
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Sound Problems with Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

[Yan-Fa Li]

Ralph,
Use the F3/F4 keys to isolate the visual controls on alsamixer.
Start alsamixer, then start by hitting F3.  This puts you in playback 
mode.  Mute "Line".  Next hit F4.  This puts you in record mode.  Then
make sure your "Captur" is set for "Line".  Next go to the capture
Slider and set the volume for how much to capture.  This is not tested 
on an audigy, I removed my audigy last week since I needed SPDIF 
optical, but the principles are the same.

Hope this helps,
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Sound Problems with Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

[Yan-Fa Li]

Ralph Kitts wrote:
I am posting this message again because nobody responded the first time. 
 It is difficult to believe that no one out there is using a Sound 
Blaster Audigy sound card.

It sounds like you have the Line-In for playback enabled.  Mute it. 
Leave the Line-In for recording unmuted.  I can't verify those settings 
because I'm at work right now.  Alsa mixer has some F keys you can push 
so you can experiment with various settings till you achieve the affect.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Getting IVTV to load at boot

[Yan-Fa Li]

M S wrote:
Hi,
I've rebuilt my mythbox recently and now I'm trying to put the pieces
back together.  I've installed a 2.0 version of IVTV drivers and they
load fine when I do a modprobe ivtv, but they don't seem to load at
boot time automatically.  I'm running debian and I've put the
appropriate info in the /etc/modutils/ivtv file and ran a
update-modules.  Like I said, I can manaully load the drivers fine,
but I can't seem to get the drivers to load automatically at boot.
Thanks!
Matt

I prefer the kiss principle:
echo "modprobe ivtv" >> /etc/rc.local
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Re: [mythtv-users] 0.17

[Yan-Fa Li]

Jarod Wilson wrote:
On Thursday 10 February 2005 21:49, Isaac Richards wrote:
The new release is up on the website now.

I'm diggin' the Minimalist-wide theme.
I'm diggin how much smoother the playback is with libmpeg.
And the new to me blue interface is snazzy.  Congrats to Isaac and 
everyone else involved on another excellent release!

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Re: [mythtv-users] 0.17

[Yan-Fa Li]

Chris Petersen wrote:
Is there a sql database update that will take place when going from
0.16 -> 0.17? I know they're done automatically, was just wondering if
the db changed...

You can almost guarantee that a new release will have db changes (to 
update the version tag if nothing else -- it often gets bumped several 
times between releases).  So yes, plenty of changes.

If in doubt, mysqldump the db before doing the upgrade.
mysqldump -umythtv -pmythtv -hlocalhost mythconverg | bzip2 -9 > 
mythtv16.backup.bz2
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Re: [mythtv-users] 0.17

[Yan-Fa Li]

Lonnie Borntreger wrote:
Also, a question can a mythtv 0.16 frontend connect to a 0.17
backend, or is that not safe?
Not compatible, protocol number is now 14.  Oh well.
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Re: [mythtv-users] Hard Drive Question

[Yan-Fa Li]

Joe Barnhart wrote:
--- Maverick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

How about recommendations in the 3.5" arena, since
2.5" seems
cost/performance prohibitive?

Can't beat that 5-year Seagate bumper-to-bumper
warranty.  Plus the drives are relatively quiet and
they offer up to 400G capacity.  I have three 300G
drives going into my HDTV backend.
This is slightly Off Topic, but I recently had to exercise the warranty 
on a failing Seagate 80GB drive.  The RMA process is all online, and 
give you 30 days to return the drive, and they tell you you will receive 
a refurbished drive.  I got one back within a few working days of 
sending the original, so it appears they have a very smooth system of 
returns already in place.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Tuner not changing channel

[Yan-Fa Li]

Jason Lee wrote:
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1
Josh Burks wrote:
| I've been playing with this a little, and found a different workaround:
|
| 1. rename /etc/rc5.d/S86mythbackend to S96mythbackend
| 2. edit /etc/init.d/mythbackend and change the following line:
|
| from
| # chkconfig: - 86 14
|
| to
| # chkconfig: - 96 04
|
| This will delay the startup of the backend so that the channels will
| change correctly.
| I tried it and rebooted half a dozen times, worked every time.
I had a similar problem.  It looks to me like the backend was starting
before the ivtv driver was loaded, so I just made sure to load the
driver early in the init process, and I've not had that problem since.
jason
Thanks to all for pointing this problem out.  I have a different theory 
though.  MySQL is not starting up soon enough, and that's leaving Myth 
in a weird state.

I recently downgraded by mythbackend to a Sempron 2200 from a 2800 and I 
noticed recordings weren't changing the channel from the default which 
is 4, even the watch TV tuner was stuck.  This caused me to miss some 
TV.  Very annoying.  I noticed if I restarted mythbackend it was able to 
change channels again.  I took a quick look at mysql and it has a start 
up of chkconfig of 90, exactly the same as the default for mythbackend.

On the faster CPU, MySQL started up quick enough this wasn't an issue. 
Since mythbackend is dependent on MySQL it is better to make sure the DB 
is up and running before we try and start it.  Moving to a slower chip 
made the race condition more apparent.  The fix is we need to make 
mythbackend start up after MySQL, not at the same time.  I changed 
mythbackend to start at 99 and deleted and added the chkconfig entry and 
everything seems to be fine again.

I guess we need to add this to a FAQ or Jarod's guide.
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] OT: NTP does not seem to be updating...

[Yan-Fa Li]

nowhere wrote:
Hi!
My mythbox's clock is drifting and it seems that ntp is not updating the
clock. There are no messages whatsoever in /var/log/messages for ntp.
Service reports ntpd to be running. If I restart the service it updates
immediately and just fine and then the correct info is logged in
/var/log/messages. Just doesn't seem to be doing it automatically. 

Thanks!
Eric
Many good posts here about what the problem might be, but in my 
experience, running ntp is often overkill for many simple hosts since it 
requires time to sync, measure the drift, etc...

The simplest solution by far is to drop a script in your 
/etc/cron.hourly folder, assuming a FC system, which contains something 
like:

#/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/ntpdate -u addressofntpserver.com
This will sync your time every hour, requires absolutely no daemon to be 
running and works very well.  If you want it to sync more often, say 
every 20 minutes, add an entry to your crontab.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] MythCVS and Unichrome on EPIA M10K

[Yan-Fa Li]

Sounds like you need to tell it which path to search.  Look at the -L 
parm for gcc and specify which directory the lib you want is in. 
Otherwise add the lib path to your /etc/ld.so.conf and rerun ldconfig

Yan
BARKER, Paul wrote:
So I decided to grab myth CVS and try to enable the Unichrome support. I 
uncommented the lines in setting.pro, did a qmake mythtv.pro, 
./configure and make. The make fails durring the link stage complaining 
that libviaXvMC cannot be found. I checked ld.so.conf and /usr/X11R6/lib 
is present and if I do ldconfig -v I see libviaXvMC.so.1 (forgive me if 
that's slightly wrong as I'm at work and going from memory). I also have 
the XvMCConfig file in /etc/X11/ pointing to libviaXvMC.so.1.

If I run ld -lviaXvMC from the shell as a test I again see the error 
about the missing library.
I tried this with Terry's RPMs first and then rebuild everything from 
source and have exactly the same problem either way.

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Re: [mythtv-users] Second Tuner Not Working

[Yan-Fa Li]

You do know that you're actually just talking to a single card right ?
Look at the minor device numbers.  There's your sign.
http://www.lanana.org/docs/device-list/devices.txt
Michael Starks wrote:
Finally, here are the video devices:
crw---  1 mythtv root 81, 0 Oct 17 11:37 /dev/video0
crw---  1 mythtv root 81, 0 Oct 17 11:37 /dev/video1
crw---  1 mythtv root 81, 0 Oct 17 11:37 /dev/video2
crw---  1 mythtv root 81, 0 Oct 17 11:37 /dev/video3
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Re: [mythtv-users] ATSC content heavy pixel-ating every 15 sec's

[Yan-Fa Li]

Two problems appear obvious:
1. Your drive isn't quite set correctly, just mostly.
Try adding:
hdparm -c3 /dev/hdb
You can also see if your chipset will tolerate
hdparm -u1 /dev/hdb
Not all of them will so you'll have to experiment to see if it causes 
problems.

2. move drive to master on /dev/hdc
You want to move the drive off the same controller as /dev/hda.  Slave 
drives have very poor performance on IDE.  You want it to be either 
master on /dev/hdc or on a different PCI IDE card away from your 
DVD-ROM.  I tend to share the DVD-ROM with the second drive because they 
are rarely active at the same time.

john roberts wrote:
I'm running a CVS build from mid-Dec and I've noticed that every 15 sec's on 
recorded content I get heavy pixel-ation (if that's a word).
For a while I thought it was due to a weak station - but it does this for all 
recordings.  And the fact it does this EVERY 15 sec's makes me think there is 
something odd going on.
I was thinking it might be a DMA issue - but the drive seems to be set 
correctly:
htpc / # /sbin/hdparm -v /dev/hdb
/dev/hdb:
 multcount= 16 (on)
 IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
 unmaskirq=  0 (off)
 using_dma=  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly =  0 (off)
 readahead= 256 (on)
 geometry = 19929/255/63, sectors = 163928604672, start = 0
My setup:
- P4 3.2G
- Dec CVS build
- Gentoo
- HD2000
- HD3000
Thanks!  Could this be a Myth issue?
-John
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Re: [mythtv-users] USB to Serial Adapter with LIRC

[Yan-Fa Li]

Last I checked they are pretty much all generically supported under the 
stock USB driver.  I used a generic cheapo one to control a LCD 
character panel about a year ago using a stock 2.4.X kernel.  As far as 
Linux could tell it was a plain jane RS232 device at /dev/ttyS2.  The 
nice thing about USB is that it'll scale quite nicely for serial devices 
since it's so much faster than any reasonable RS232 device you'd ever 
use.  You might need to invest in a USB hub if your motherboard doesn't 
have connectors, but at this point I wouldn't sweat it.

Drew Zerdecki wrote:
Because I won't have an available PCI slot for a serial port card, can I 
use a usb to serial device with Linux/LIRC support so that at least one 
of the directv boxes can be controlled through this usb adapter?  If so, 
what kind of USB to Serial adapters should I purchase?  Any additionally 
Linux drivers necessary?

Thanks for the assistance.
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Re: [mythtv-users] OT: out of disk space, but not really....

[Yan-Fa Li]

Even simpler.  Create a known file on the ntfs side and check for it. 
An unmounted file system should be an empty directory.  If the file is
there you much have successfully mounted the fs.

if [ -f /mnt/ntfs/ntfs.mounted ] ; then
do you stuff here
else
echo "Error: NTFS File System not mounted.  Aborting." >2
fi
Not sure about the above script as I did it from memory.
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID on Fedora Core 3?

[Yan-Fa Li]

Not sure what it is you are looking for ?  Low price or port density. 
One trades off the other.  Just one rule, stay away from Promise. 
Pretty much everything available today is good enough.

I quite like the Silicon Image 680 based cards.  Very cheap and work 
quite well.  I've used CMD based cards reliably over the years. 
HighPoint has reasonable driver support for the 37X family.  Some of the 
newer chipsets are beta.  Anything that's not SATA should have excellent 
support.  3Ware is good choice if you have lots of money and need lots 
of density per PCI slot or 64bit support.

Check the archives for the recent RAID thread, it rehashes almost 
everything you want to know.  Just remember with that many drives you're 
ultimate gate is PCI 32bit/33MHz performance.  Which realistically is 
about 40-80MB/s depending on wether you're reading or writing.  To get 
any higher you'll need PCI-X or PCIe.

Hopefully the new NForce4 boards which are about to hit the market will 
give us PCIe for Athlon 64.

Yan
Max Waterman wrote:
While I am waiting for opinions, I am coming to the conclusion that 
Highpoint is a name to look for.

Is this right?
Max.
Max Waterman wrote:
Hi,
I am trying to build a MythTV/dvarchive box. I bought 4 Promise 
Ultra100TX2 PCI cards, but found that they wouldn't work
with more than 2 in a system :(

I was going to use linux s/w raid over the drives.
I know you guys must use plenty of raid setups, so thought you'd be 
the best to advise on which types are best.

I am running FC3, and have 4 WD800/8 and 4 WD2000/8 drives that I want 
to be two RAID5 volumes. I am running
on a nForce3 250Gb, so network traffic is not a problem with the PCI 
bus, but gfx/video output maybe is (I haven't
chosen my final gfx/video setup, but am currently using a cheap TNT2 
gfx card).

I heard that Promise is giving 'lack-lustre' Linux support, so I'm 
totally open to not using Promise cards. I also heard
that cards which do h/w RAID will give less load on the PCI bus.

How should I do this? What h/w?
Max.
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Re: [mythtv-users] problem with mysql

[Yan-Fa Li]

You need to either update the host entry in the mysql.user table or 
grant the same user rights from your new ip address.

Login as root mysql user:

grant all on mythconverg.* to 'mythtv'@'%' identifed by 'mythtv'
flush privileges;

substitute your IP address for '%' if you want more security.
Or

connect mysql;
update user set Host='%' where User='mythtv';
flush privileges;

substitute your IP address for '%' if you want more security.
'%' means any host.  It's not recommended but it is very convenient if 
you're network is firewalled behind a NAT gateway and you have multiple 
frontend boxen.

Yan
ryan wrote:
i changed my local ip and since then i cant log into mysql to update tv 
listings =\
any ideas?
-chi

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Re: [mythtv-users] Plextor Mpeg4 Hardware Encoding & N00b Requesting Advice

[Yan-Fa Li]

No, not yet.  I just emailed them for a datasheet, but they won't supply 
unless you sign an NDA.  It's a WIS GO7007SB.  Their sales guy claimed 
that WIS was working on a binary API to be released early next yet. 
This chip is sweet because it outputs MPEG4 natively and appears fully
programmable.  Apparently the windows software is lame.  Also it's not 
firewire, it's USB2, a cyprus semi chip.  If we could only get specs, 
I'm betting this thing would make an excellent input for Myth, 
especially since you could hook more than one much more easily than 
consuming PCI slots.

Yan
Bryan Miller wrote:
Hello to all,
Does the hardware from plextor run under Myth?
It says it has hardware encoding for mpeg4, and it has a firewire port. 
If it has firewire, is it merely telling the device to record, and it 
spits it out as a stream through the FW port? Kinda like an on/off 
switch... Prolly more coding involved, but I would figure something like 
that would be a little easier to code than the 150. Am I wrong? I 
haven't looked. Again, I'm TEH N003. :P

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Re: [mythtv-users] OT: Dual Channel DDR

[Yan-Fa Li]

Joseph Caputo wrote:
My understanding was that dual-channel needed at least PC3200 RAM (400 
MHz); the difference in price is probably due to the fact that if you're 
not running in dual-channel mode most mobos fall back to PC2700 speeds 
(333 MHz), so if you're not running dual-channel there's no point in 
buying the more expensive PC3200 RAM.  The fact that you need 2x sticks 
of identical RAM for dual channel does not add as much to the price as 
the difference between PC2700/PC3200.
The only issue concerning FSB speed that I'm aware of is the case of the 
size of the memory modules on certain chipsets.  For example, the NForce 
2 Ultra board I own, says in the manual, will only support modules up to 
512MB @ PC3200.  Modules larger than 512MB are only supported @ PC2700. 
 This is probably an electrical timing or loading issue.  In this case 
I didn't really care because the CPU runs at 333MHz and I wasn't 
planning on doing any overclocking.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Re: Building a myth box, wanna look over my components?

[Yan-Fa Li]

Mike Isely wrote:
I will do more testing with 2.6.9-ac14 and see if anything has improved.
It may take a while.  Even with these problems I can still get uptimes of
several weeks so it's pretty hard to get something statistically
significant without a lot of testing time.
With all that said, clearly I am not going to recommend nforce2 boards so
long as I'm still having problems with mine.  But your mileage may vary...
  -Mike
Yikes.  You sound like you're having other problems.  All I can suggest 
is fundamentals.

The holy trinity of PCs: Power Supply/Power Source, Memory, Motherboard
Assuming you have a half decent PSU, because AMD stuff requires min of 
350W, you could look into wether you have brownout conditions due to
overloading or perhaps dirty power due to some other appliance or a
noisy circuit.  I've seen perfectly good hardware act completely wacko
when the circuit was too heavily loaded.

Memory falls to memtest86+.  This catches most, if not all, memory issues.
Motherboard.  I'm not a huge fan of Abit.  Their quality of the years 
has been variable.  Maybe you could check your board for leaking caps. 
Instability in the power circuit would cause issues with stability.
My first myth system was on a box with bad caps and caused me no end of 
stress and grief.  Replacing the MB and CPU with NF2 fixed it.  Later I
replaced the caps on the "bad" board and now it runs like a champ.

Good luck tracking down your problem.
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Re: Building a myth box, wanna look over my components?

[Yan-Fa Li]

Mike Isely wrote:
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Gordon Rimac wrote:

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 01:21:36 -0600, Derek Gathright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
NForce2 is bad?  Wow, really?  That what I've had others suggest to
me.  Anyone else wanna chime in?
I had bad luck with an Abit NF7 (nForce2) board.  I was using it on my
backend and had system freezes frequently (hard lock).  It ended up
being the PVR-250 cards and/or the ivtv drivers.  Once I removed them
the NF7 has been rock solid as a front-end and the tuner cards have
been working fine in an ECS motherboard (SIS chipset) on my backend.

You don't find it odd that the nForce2 rig had problems with that
hardware?  This is actually an interesting datapoint.  One of my more
recent unexplained hard lockups happened while testing a WinTV-Go card in
my nForce2 system.  About ten seconds into recording a show the system
locked up.  Maybe PCI access has something to do with the problems.  The
CD writer-related lockups I've had would fit this because the IDE
controller in that case is also a PCI card.
It's not that interesting because there was a well known problem with 
NForce2 chipsets locking up under moderate IO.  This has been fixed in 
all recent kernels.  There was some fixup required in their IO-APIC 
hardware that could be worked around.  I'm running both 2.6.9 and 2.4.27 
on NForce2 hardware with great success.  Infact my mythbackend has 
regular uptimes over 30 days.

Try newer kernels, the ones that shipped originally with FC were 
susceptible to this problem.

http://atlas.et.tudelft.nl/verwei90/nforce2/
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Hard Drives that Actually Work?

[Yan-Fa Li]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I just had my second Western Digital Special Edition 200 GB drive die on me.  Since I'm using an ASUS Pundit, I figured heat was the culprit, so the second drive had a dual-fan cooler on it.  No such luck.  After about three months of use, performance suddenly degrades, and the journals begin to corrupt.  A few days later, I/O errors crop up, and the drive is pretty much useless.  

Are these drives just not up to the stress of a PVR?  I'm interested in hearing 
what kind of drives people have had good luck with, as I've about had it with 
these.  I'll get my third on warranty, but It won't be going back into a myth 
box.
Thanks,
Paul
Aside from manufacturing problems, heat seems to be the biggest issue. 
One of the reasons I really like the Myth design.  Split 
backend/frontend architecture.  My backend has a 120mm fan sitting 
infront of the drive cage with four drives.  My front end has a 5400RPM 
drive inside a noise insulator.  One day I intend to convert it to net boot.

Preference: Seagate (5 yr), Hitachi (3 yr), Maxtor/WD (1 yr)
I did manage to get a pair of Maxtor quickview (5400RPM) drives recently 
and so far so evil, but it's early days.  I have a stack of failed 
drives from 2001/2002 and they are from all manufacturers.  Ironically 
my Tivo has two maxtors in it and has been mucho reliable.

One thing you can do, once you have your new drive installed is monitor 
it's heat.  Smartmontools are your friend.  Most new drives have a temp 
sensor.  I like to try and keep my drives below 40C if I can.  Only 
during the summer is this a difficult goal.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations for mythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Russ Dill wrote:
I didn't have the money, so I ended up getting a cheap HighPoint card
and using Linux software RAID to replace my FastTrack.  The FastTrack
is definitely faster than softRAID in terms of throughput, but I'd
rather have safer, slower data personally.

As far as just adding ide ports, would you recommend highpoint?

I've had good luck with Silicon Image 680 cards, I've used them half a 
dozen times.  They are usually 20-30USD retail.  I currently have two of 
them in my mythbox and they co-exist quite happily with all my onboard 
IDE and SCSI boxen.  They are UDMA 6 compatible and appear sanely designed.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations formythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Dave Howorth wrote:
Try this one for a different explanation that I believe describes 
current disks:

'Zoned recording' is the important difference.

/dev/md1: Timing buffered disk reads:  136 MB in  3.01 seconds =
45.18 MB/sec

The figures above are for the outside of the disk, those below for the 
inside.

/dev/md4: Timing buffered disk reads:   98 MB in  3.01 seconds =
32.56 MB/sec

Cheers, Dave
Thanks for clearing that up.  I think my mistake was thinking that the 
1st track was in the inner part of the disk.  Appears they now start 
from the outside and move in.  Very interesting, and my apologies
for being old :D

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations formythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

I am evil :D
John Andersen wrote:
Continuing with this evil top posting.
Your analogy is largely obsolete, as drive manufactures took steps
to utilize the the surface uniformly years ago.
On Wednesday 08 December 2004 16:30, Yan-Fa Li wrote:
Think of an old fashioned 78RPM record player.  The disc spins at a
constant speed, 78RPM.  The outer part of the disc is moving faster than
the inner part, but the time the head has to read and write is the same
regardless of where you are on the disc.  Therefore the inner part gets
data faster because it has to spin much less to read the same amount of
data assuming all the tracks hold exactly the same amount.
I agree with you that the mapping information is now handled 
differently, i.e. that when I say track 80, sector 50, it's remapped 
internally to something different, but the principle of the example 
still hold true:

http://www.ntfs.com/hard-disk-basics.htm
Also if I do hdpart -t on each zone of a pair of 160GB hard disks I 
partitioned:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# hdparm -t /dev/md1
/dev/md1:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  136 MB in  3.01 seconds =  45.18 MB/sec
[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# hdparm -t /dev/md2
/dev/md2:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  126 MB in  3.01 seconds =  41.86 MB/sec
[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# hdparm -t /dev/md3
/dev/md3:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  116 MB in  3.03 seconds =  38.28 MB/sec
[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# hdparm -t /dev/md4
/dev/md4:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   98 MB in  3.01 seconds =  32.56 MB/sec
Empirically that demonstrates that the principle is still valid.  Inner 
parts of the disk perform at higher rates than the outer part.  The 
result is valid on both the RAID partitions and the hard drives directly.

[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md4 : active raid1 hdi4[0] hdk4[1]
  40098176 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md3 : active raid1 hdi3[0] hdk3[1]
  39993728 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md2 : active raid1 hdi2[0] hdk2[1]
  39993728 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 hdi1[0] hdk1[1]
  39993664 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# hdparm -i /dev/hdi
/dev/hdi:
 Model=Maxtor 4R160L0, FwRev=RAMB1TU0, SerialNo=R4202E2E
 Config={ Fixed }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
 BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=268435455
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 udma6
 AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: (null):
 * signifies the current active mode
Try this experiment for yourself.  You'll see what I mean.
Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] Re: RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations for mythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Russ Dill wrote:
(BTW, there was someone here mentioning breaking up a raid array for
the purpose of hiding bad sectors. Modern drives automatically
relocate bad sectors. If you start to get errors from a modern drive,
its a mechanical, electrical, or really big media failure)
I beg to differ, only SCSI drives guarentee sector reallocation 
dynamically.  That's what you're paying for, a smart controller.  IDE 
drives generally depend on the user to run an DOS util to get the same 
effect.  Check the IBM DFT tool, Seagate Seatools and Maxtor Maxblast. 
They all do external sector reallocation.  Very rarely do low end IDE 
drives perform this function automatically.  I've repaired at least a 
dozen drives using the external tool and gotten service from them as 
good as new.

Breaking up the drive doesn't "HIDE" the sectors, it mitigates the 
resync time.  Sector failure tends to occur in clusters, not wide spread 
across a drive.  By making the partition smaller you decrease repair 
time after you've done the repair.

Check your drive.  SMART Keys 5, 197 and 198 indicate sectors which are 
either reallocated or need to be.

Yan
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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations formythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Think of an old fashioned 78RPM record player.  The disc spins at a 
constant speed, 78RPM.  The outer part of the disc is moving faster than 
the inner part, but the time the head has to read and write is the same 
regardless of where you are on the disc.  Therefore the inner part gets 
data faster because it has to spin much less to read the same amount of 
data assuming all the tracks hold exactly the same amount.

Dave Howorth wrote:
Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm not sure what you mean by the inner 
parts having greater areal density. I thought that tracks near the 
outside of the disk had more sectors so that the lineal density was 
comparable to that on the inner portions of the disk. Wouldn't that also 
make the areal density comparable?

Thanks again for all the useful advice on building RAID arrays.
Dave
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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations for mythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Yes if you use LVM on top of RAID and a file system which supports 
extending on the fly like XFS.

Bryan Brannigan wrote:
Can I add drives to the array later?
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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations for mythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Yes move the disks to another machine and reboot.
Bryan Brannigan wrote:
What is the reliability of software RAID in the event of a motherboard
failure?  Will I be able to recover my array?
Can I add drives to the array later?
On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 13:44:28 -0900, John Andersen
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tuesday 07 December 2004 12:51, Andrew Plumb wrote:
Hi Everyone,
For those who do use hardware RAID5 cards for ATA IDE drives, which
cards have you (not) had success with, for use in a mythtvbackend
machine?  Or in any Linux-based machine for that matter?
I'm pondering picking up something like a Promise FastTrak SX4000.
Why bother.  Software raid easily outperforms any of these
raid cards,  Its Robust, Mature, Universally Supported, Open Source
and highly configurable.
Oh, and did I say ROCK SOLID?
--
__Jsa_

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Re: [mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations formythbackend machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Being cheap, I still think that I would rather not use the onboard RAID 
implementation, even of a well respected card like 3ware, because of the 
lack of low-level access to the actual drive which impacts recovery and 
performance.

In my experience, most problems with RAID tend to be:
a. sectors going bad - transient
b. drives going bad  - fatal
Sectors going bad, pretty much always requires taking the drive out of 
service and running the vendor provided sector reallocation tool.  I'm 
hoping one day you'll be able to initiate this from SMART commands 
directly but as of now this is not the case.

Drives going bad is self explanatory.
In my experience, once a drive has been added to a Hardware RAID set, 
you can't access it directly.  This makes using the Hard Drive vendor 
recovery tools impossible, since the drive is hidden from low-level 
access.  This requires you to either remove it from the set to perform 
repair tasks or take it out of the system and put it into a standalone 
box where the repair can be performed.

At least with Soft RAID solutions, you have the additional flexibility 
of being able to run the HD vendor tool directly on the drive. 
Additionally Soft RAID can use physical disk partitioning on the drive 
to speed up recovery and guarentee performance.

Here's something I've been playing with recently after getting the idea 
off of other Soft RAID users.  I set up a two 160GB drives.  Then I 
partitioned each of them into 4 x 40GB partitions.  I made each pair of 
partitions into RAID1 sets.  I then LVM'd all the RAID1 sets into a 
single partition and formatted them using XFS.

So, as you may ask, why the crazy partitioning scheme ?  Speeding up 
resync time.  The biggest problem with large RAID sets is that it takes 
a longer and longer to resync.  Because the majority of problems with 
RAID arrays are related to sector failure, large RAID1 sets are 
suceptible to being knocked out with only a few bad sectors.  This means 
excessive resync time and unnecessary wear and tear on the drive.

Bottom line: I'd rather resync a 40GB partition than a 160GB one.
As a side benefit there now are some interesting things you can do 
related to performance.  This is an old trick streaming video guys used 
to use when disks had much lower performance.  Disk performance is 
related to how far you are from the spindle.

Think of each of the RAID sets as a zone, with Zone 1, being closest to 
the spindle and having a higher areal density  and Zone 4 the outer most 
part of the disk being the slowest.  If one wanted, one could use the 
different zones of the disk for different jobs.  For example, it would 
make sense to put TV buffering on the fastest part of the drive, so you 
could use Zone 1 for TV buffering.  Zone 4 however is all about storage 
and one could use it for long term file or video storage, or even not at 
all if performance were critical.

Yan
Jurgen Kramer wrote:
On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 16:51 -0500, Andrew Plumb wrote:
Hi Everyone,
For those who do use hardware RAID5 cards for ATA IDE drives, which
cards have you (not) had success with, for use in a mythtvbackend
machine?  Or in any Linux-based machine for that matter?
I'm pondering picking up something like a Promise FastTrak SX4000.
Thanks!
Andrew.
I can recommend the 3ware 9000 series (SATA), it is a bit expansive but
is otherwise rock solid and has good Linux support.
Jurgen

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Re: [mythtv-users] Repeating audio on SMP machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Take a look at Robert Love's web page.  Schedutils might have something 
you can try:

http://www.tech9.net/rml/schedutils/
Yan
Kane Tse wrote:
Try forcing the capture card and audio capture IRQ processing onto one
CPU. It could be that the process is being migrated between CPUs and
the driver is not completely SMP safe.

I read up on the smp_affinity file and made the modifications, but 
ultimately, it didn't help.  I made the following observations:

1) When I did a 'cat /proc/irq/17/smp_affinity', I got 0001 
suggesting the IRQ was redirected to CPU0.  But when I did:

cd /proc/irq/17
cat smp_affinity
I got 0002.  Which is really strange, since they should be the same 
file right?  Also, this also suggested that input is already handled by 
one CPU, namely CPU0.

2)  When I did an lspci -v | grep 17:, I noticed CPU0 was handling 
almost all the processing for that card, so did an echo 2 > 
/proc/irq/17/smp_affinity to redirect IRQ processing onto CPU1.  
Performing a 'cat /proc/irq/17/smp_affinity' showed 0002, which 
suggested that IRQ processing was being handled by CPU1.   This was 
confirmed by lspci -v | grep 17:.  But after a few minutes, 'cat 
/proc/irq/17/smp_affinity' reverted back to 0001... for no reason, 
and the problems didn't go away (although i couldn't tell if this was 
before or after the reversion back to 0001.

What's up with that?  Why did it revert back?

Anyway, it seems to me that CPU0 was already directed to process input 
from IRQ17, so maybe that wasn't my problem.  But tonight when I get 
home I am going to clean-install Fedora Core 3 on that machine and see 
if things improve or not.

Thanks for your help though.  And let me know if you have any other ideas.
Is anyone else out there running a bt8x8 and btaudio on an SMP setup?  
Which OS are you using?  Any problems?


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Re: [mythtv-users] hD-3000 identification

[Yan-Fa Li]

The actual chip is probably manufactured by Conexant, this is their 
PCID.  Some manufacturers replace the first ID with their own so that it 
prints the appropriate companies name up, like HP or IBM.  I wouldn't 
sweat it, as long as it works.  You can simply supply and updated device
entry for the PCID guys so instead of Unknown it can print PCHDTV 3000
or perhaps the ATSC chip model number.

Yan
Chuck Rice wrote:
That was a bit difficult to locate. Goggling pciutil turned up lots of 
irrelevant stuff. But there was a link which redirected to another link 
<http://pciids.sourceforge.net/> in the comments of the pci.ids file.

My file was only 3 or 4 months old, but I upgraded it anyway.
Still the database says that that vendor ID is held by Conexant, not 
pcHDTV. Are they the same company?

lspci -n gives me:
00:09.0 Class 0400: 14f1:8800 (rev 05)
00:09.2 Class 0480: 14f1:8802 (rev 05)
for those entries. -Chuck-
At 4:55 PM -0800 12/5/04, Yan-Fa Li wrote:
Only if your pci util database has been updated recently.  Add it 
yourself:

/usr/share/hwdata/
and then send a patch to the pciutil maintainers.
Yan
Chuck Rice wrote:
I have a pcHDTV HD3000. Why, when I do an lspci, do I get
00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Conexant Winfast TV2000 XP (rev 05)
00:09.2 Multimedia controller: Conexant: Unknown device 8802 (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV40 [GeForce 
6800] (rev a1)

Who/what is Conextant? Shouldn't it say pcHDTV HD-3000? -Chuck-

!DSPAM:41b3c36a161475120419618!

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Re: [mythtv-users] hD-3000 idintification

[Yan-Fa Li]

Only if your pci util database has been updated recently.  Add it yourself:
/usr/share/hwdata/
and then send a patch to the pciutil maintainers.
Yan
Chuck Rice wrote:
I have a pcHDTV HD3000. Why, when I do an lspci, do I get
00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Conexant Winfast TV2000 XP (rev 05)
00:09.2 Multimedia controller: Conexant: Unknown device 8802 (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV40 [GeForce 
6800] (rev a1)

Who/what is Conextant? Shouldn't it say pcHDTV HD-3000? -Chuck-

!DSPAM:41b3a9c6159971036397316!

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Re: [mythtv-users] Repeating audio on SMP machine

[Yan-Fa Li]

Try forcing the capture card and audio capture IRQ processing onto one 
CPU.  It could be that the process is being migrated between CPUs and 
the driver is not completely SMP safe.

/proc/sys/irq/xx/smp_affinity
You can read about it in Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
in the kernel source code.
A similar problem occurs under high network load, where multiple CPUs 
may trigger out of order packet delivery.  Forcing the IRQ to only be 
serviced from a particular CPU fixes that problem.

Yan
Kane Tse wrote:
I do notice that both myself and the original poster has a 
dual-processor Althon machine containing the capture card.  I wonder if 
that could be the problem?  Anyone else running a dual-processor Althon 
with a BT-8x8 based card?

Thanks!
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