Great thread. I have a PVR 250 with the same problem!

THANKS!!

Andrew Lynch

PS, I think this thread belongs in the HOWTO documentation

I have a newer (type 39) PVR-250 with the same problem - grainy vertical lines on every channel after the box has been running for some time. I don't have a a fix.sh cron job going yet, but another workaround is to disconnect the cable input for a moment. I guess this does the same electrically as switching inputs. Works it every time for me (lazy and inelegant but hey).

I'm wondering if any progress has been made towards correcting the underlying problem so we don't need these kludges.

Since I have three PVR-250's I created the following script:



and being a bit of a pessimist I elected to run this every 20 min, at 19, 39, and 59 min after the hour. using this crontab entry:



I will see if this helps my recordings. I am using the .1.9 drivers.

-Rusty

_________________
Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)

Thanks, I am going to implement this. I'm wondering what happens when fix.sh runs while a card is recording. Does a glitch get recorded or does the card ignore the "switch input" command while it's busy encoding TV? Hmm I guess I could just try it and find out, eh?

From watching TV while the script is running, I see a very slight interruption, which I suspect is a blank frame in the stream. It should not be enough to trigger a comercial detect, and most people will never notice it unless they are looking for it.

I just frame at a time scanned through one of these events and I don't see any indication in a ny frame that it had any affect at all.

I suspect that in most cases the swap of ports, back and forth happens fast enough that the mpeg encoder on the pvr-250 (and 350 I presume) treats it as a spurious event to discard.

-Rusty

_________________
Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)

I tied this in to my channel change script instead of a cron job. Since the channel change happens immediately before every recording it seems to work well. I haven't had any vertical bars since putting this hack in place.

I still get the occasional blank recording and find the easiest way to clear that condition is to reboot.

Upgrading your ivtv driver and firmware is a much cleaner solution, and really quite painless.

I remember upgrading it, downgrading, sidewaysgrading, trying different combinations etc. when I first built my box. Wasn't painless. I'm sure the ivtv stuff is better now, but it's a production box. With a wife and 3 kids watching it I have to stay up till the wee hours to work on it. And it had *better* be working in the morning.

I see you have discovered the unanticipated WAF success problem. I am feeling your pain...



Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

I've had really good results and very consistently high quality using ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck100z and the firmware from pvr250_18_22037.exe which checksums as:
The tuner appears to be quite stable, current uptime is over 19 days and the quality is still the same. My total time to put both pieces in place was under half an hour.

Whew, I didn't know the PVR 250 was flashable. There are many versions of the 250, are they all flashable? I would assume each flavor of 250 requires specific firmware. Time to visit the Hauppauge site...

...okay, they have a later file "WinTV-PVR Update: pvr250_22_22292.exe" which seems to be a Windows driver. I'm guessing I will have to swap the PVR-250 card into a Windows box, run the driver install which along the way will flash the firmware (???), then move the card back into my Myth box. BTW my 250 is brand new (silver remote, tuner 39) and current update on Hauppauge's site is dated October 18, 2004. How can I tell the firmware version I currently have? I don't want to risk flashing if it's unnecessary.

It's not flashable. the firmware gets loaded into ram when the module loads, so you can't just install the firmware and be done with it many devices are using this method now, and it's actually nicer than the old flash paradigm because if you get a bad firmware image or something it doesn't toast the device you just use a good one the next time. to use a different firmware you get the .exe file and use one of the utilities that comes with the ivtv drivers to extract the firmware. can't remember the exact name of the utility, but it's evident if you look at the util dir of the ivtv source.

_________________
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