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James L. Paul wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid200404021427.07665.james@mauibay.net" type="cite">
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On Friday 02 April 2004 10:12, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
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<pre wrap="">On Friday 02 April 2004 00:36, James L. Paul wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">On Friday 19 March 2004 04:31, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">On Friday 19 March 2004 01:55, James L. Paul wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">On Thursday 18 March 2004 18:29, Steven Marcotte wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">Does it kind of look like you are watching TV through a wire
pasta strainer? That seems to be the PVR250 wierdness that I
experience from time to time. Sometimes I'll go weeks without
any problems, other times it seems to be a daily occurence.
The problem fixes itself if I disconnect the cable input or
reboot the computer.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Yah, that's one way to put it, I have sort of a vertical banding
with lines, and oversaturated dropout also. A quick cable
disconnect/reconnect of less than a second clears it right up for
the next few days or more.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">As for a solution to the problem, I think that is in the hands
of the ivtv developers. They have done a wonderful job so far,
its only a matter of time before the bugs are worked out.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">Interesting. I wouldn't have suspected this to be an ivtv driver
issue. Possibly firmware, but that's the same no matter what
driver we use. And I disconnect/reconnect the cable so fast that
the driver never drops the stream. Plus, removing and reloading
the driver doesn't affect the problem, neither does rebooting the
machine. The image problem is persistent until I disconnect the
cable input briefly.
It is very similar to a problem I've encountered in cable TV
signal distribution with a broken coaxial cable. If the cable has
a very tiny break or gap in the center conductor, it can still
transfer the RF energy even though it's not solidly conducting.
Over time static charge can accumulate and result in signal
quality changes similar to what I am seeing. I'm ruling this out
though because another main effect of this kind of problem is
that it gets worse with higher frequencies since the RF energy
loss is proportionate to frequency. With the broken cable the
higher channels are noticeably worse than the lower channels, and
my problem is independent of channel number. Also, if my main
input cable was bad, it would more likely affect all my tuners,
not just the two PVR250's.
I'm actually considering a temporary workaround of putting A/B
switches inline to my cards, with the B side disconnected. At
least it would make it easier to clear up the signal by not
having to fumble with the F-connectors. :) I hate considering
such a kludge though.
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">I had similar symptoms last night... my picture quality on both my
M-179's had deteriorated; one with oversaturated colors, the other
not quite as bad, but noticeable. A reboot didn't help, but
unloading/ reloading the ivtv driver not once, but a couple of
times, seemed to finally fix the issue.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Just an update after trying the unload/reload driver trick for more
than a week... It doesn't seem to be reliable. A couple times it
worked, a single reload cleared up the problem. But a couple times it
wouldn't work at all no matter how many times I reloaded. In those
cases the only fix was to briefly unplug the cable from the card
input, that cleared it up.
I'd really like to find a solution to this, it's annoying. ;) It's
embarrassing to have to flip to the backup Tivo to watch a recording.
I think I'll experiment next with switching inputs and generally
resetting lots of ivtv parameters to see if that somehow knocks the
quality back to what it should be.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Yeah, I've found that the unload/reload trick is not reliable for me,
either. It works about every other reload for my 1st M-179, but hardly
ever works at all for my 2nd M-179. I'd love to resolve this as well.
</pre>
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
Perhaps this is premature as I only played for a half hour or so last night,
but it seems so far in my case that switching the card input to something
else and then back to cable does the trick. It also has the advantage of not
needing the driver to be unloaded and so doesn't significantly disrupt any
recordings in progress.
In my case my cable tuner input is 4, so I am now calling something like this
from cron once a day:
#!/bin/sh
/in/ivtv/utils/test_ioctl -d /dev/video0 -p 5
/bin/sleep 2
/in/ivtv/utils/test_ioctl -d /dev/video0 -p 4
/in/ivtv/utils/test_ioctl -d /dev/video1 -p 5
/bin/sleep 2
/in/ivtv/utils/test_ioctl -d /dev/video1 -p 4
Last night I was watching live output from /dev/video0 while it was displaying
the problem. As soon as the input was switched back to 4 the problem was
gone. I was doing a lot of stuff though, and the problem hasn't happened
again yet so I'm not positive this will always work. Obviously you may have
to change the input port numbers to appropriate values for your hardware (and
the command paths), but this is what worked on mine and it's what I'm going
to test for the next couple weeks instead of reloading the driver.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">-JAC
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</pre>
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</pre>
</blockquote>
I was having trouble like this too, but decided to buy a signal
amplifier anyway. It seems to have solve the issue for me. On a side
note I did find that one of the connections on the cable splitter that
went to the cable splitter that was connected to my mythbox was not
tightly fastened as well. <br>
<br>
But all in all this did seem to fix the bad singal problem I was seeing.<br>
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