I have a knoppmyth setup that does everything wonderfully (with very little effort), but every few weeks it seems its starts to have poor-quality video in both recorded programs and live TV. Older recordings which looked fine originially continue to look fine, as does anything in my video library. This therefore seems to be a IVTV proglem, or perhaps a hardware problem in my PVR-250. A reboot has fixed this issue twice in the past, but the third time this happened (yesterday), the reboot either didn't help or the problem came back much quicker (I failed to check the quality immediately after the reboot).

Because its nearly impossible to describe the effect on quality, I took a screen shot of my mythweb 'recorded programs' screen [please don't make fun of my wife's program selections ]

http://www.kolrom.com/myth_problem.png

As you can clearly see, the 'House of Mouse' episode at the bottom of the image is fine, and the next day's recording is not. Experience has shown that this strange 'blue snow' will appear on all recordings and live tv until a reboot (but now I'm not even sure that will help).

Any ideas?

Thanx,
-B.J.

Ah, the nasty vertical stripes. We discussed this a while back. For once, I was able to locate something using search.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... l+vertical

The "solution" in that thread is kind of an ugly hack. If memory serves the deeper cause was a firmware/driver issue and upgrading those would solve the problem far more reliably. I'm running ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck100z and I believe the firmware from pvr250_18_22037.exe, they checksum as:
This cured it for me without needing to reset the system at an arbitrary time that might disrupt a recording.

Thanx for the replies. I checked the checksums on my machine, and they match yours:

root@mythbox:~ # md5sum /lib/modules/ivtv-fw-*
305dba74bbe5905447add8883f3ecb68 /lib/modules/ivtv-fw-dec.bin
ab75947ef1b086e26f9b08e628baa02e /lib/modules/ivtv-fw-enc.bin

However, my ivtv version is older than yours, I think:

root@mythbox:~ # dmesg | grep ivtv
ivtv: version 0.1.9 (release) loading
...

I went through many iterations in creating this machine, but I think in the final (current) one, I didn't update ivtv from whatever knoppmyth came with.

I guess my next step is to try upgrading it. I seem to recall seeing a sticky post detailing how to do that, but if anyone reading this post has additional info on the process, I'd appreciate it.

My wife just called because she finally caught on to the fact that the recordings have been 'bad' for the past few days (I was hoping to fix it before she noticed); so I remotely rebooted the box and sure enough, it's working fine again.

I guess it was anomolous that the reboot last time didn't help; for now I'll go with the theory that it worked, but the problem happened to have come back quicker than usual that one time. I'll be keeping track from now on as to how often it returns, and keep this thread updated for posterity.

Hopefully this weekend I'll have time to try the ivtv upgrade.

-egoman

tjc, you're absolutely right about it being a nasty hack, and I should have pointed that out. Back when I did it there was no other solution. I went through many different combinations of firmware and drivers at the time and this finally worked. I'm sticking with it for now, but maybe if my wife visits her parents for a week I'll have time to play with updating.

I upgraded ivtv on Sunday, and it really is as easy as grabbing the latest tar file (I used ivtv-0.2.0-rc2r.tgz), unpacking, changing to the driver dir, and `make` then `make install` and reboot. If I knew more about linux I'm sure one could do it without a reboot, but I was raised on Windows and rebooting is all I know

Everything's been working fine so far, but then just this afternoon the remote stopped working -- irw shows nothing. I doubt its related, but I just wanted to post that here in case someone knows of a good reason why it *would* be related.

-egoman

In case anyone is still curious, it turns out my remote difficulty was caused by the IR reciever cable not being well-seated in the PVR-250. It felt fine, but pulling it out and putting it back in fixed it.

-egoman