I've been totally dead in the water for about a week now in trying to get multiple PVR-250's in the same backend to actually work when recording simultaneously. Only the first card gets used, often "stolen" by later recordings, and various other misbehaviors happen as well, probably related to this underlying behavior, such as audio vanishing and sometimes requiring a long, hard power-off to fix. (This latter problem incorrectly caused me to believe that audio wasn't working, in http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6683, when it was instead a multiple-tuner problem that was leaving the BE in a screwed-up state.)

Can anyone either (a) suggest ways to debug/fix this, or (b) at least tell me that it's working for you, so we can share configuration information? Without either, my choices are (a) drop back to A16 and see if it works there, or (b) give up on KnoppMyth entirely and try a different distribution. Thanks!

Lots, -lots- more information about what's going on and what my configuration is are in the threads at http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-user ... 07890.html and http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-user ... 7891.html; unfortunately, I haven't gotten much actual information back from there. (In particular, at least one A16 user has said, "works for me", but I haven't heard from A22 users at all).

P.S. See also the thread on the ivtv list, http://www.ivtvdriver.org/pipermail/ivt ... 00178.html, which has some of my other debugging response to questions there. In particular, I can't seem to get any tuner other than the one in card0 to claim it detects signal, despite the obvious swap-cards/swap-RF-in/make sure it's plugged in stuff.

I am not in front of my backend to look, but make sure that it is auto detecting the cards when the system is loading. Turn off the splash screen. You can also check the logs to see that it is detecting them.

Just a note: I did an auto-upgrade of A22 from A16. I have 3 PVR250 and all three work correctly. I did no have to do anything other than set them up in mythtv-setup in the order I wanted. All three record at once just fine.

dmesg reports that IVTV sees all five cards. Is that what you're talking about? If you've looked in the logs I posted at the referenced URLs, and think that there's somewhere else I should be looking, please let me know.

Otherwise, it'd be interesting to compare configurations, although I'm not sure where to start. What tuner-type are the cards? What motherboard? Maybe you can post your dmesg output?

[It'd also be interesting to know if auto-upgrade does anything differently from a fresh install. In -theory-, I believe it wipes the relevant partitions, but I've already tripped over bugs that half a dozen others have seen but that the KP distro's author can't reproduce (e.g., the SQL hostname-iniitalization bug), so I'm suspicious that something might be different between the two cases.]

Thanks!

Wait a minute---an upgrade keeps your database around, doesn't it? After all, it's gotta know what shows you've already recorded, so you don't lose them. (I've never done an upgrade, so I'm guessing here.) That means that if Myth is doing something to correctly initialize cards in A16, it might continue to do so in A22 if whatever it is happens to be controlled by the database. OTOH, a fresh A22 install might not.

So I guess I'm still looking for someone who's done a fresh A22 install (total disk wipe or start from blank disk), -and- who has multiple 250's in one machine, who's having good luck with it. Maybe A22 is new enough that there are very few people in that situation so far; I have no idea.

I think I've just solved this problem; I was able to reproduce it in A16, realized the failure, and fixed it, and I have every confidence that the same problem affected my A22 installation. The underlying cause is a gross violation of usability engineering principles in mythtv-setup, eventually leading to multiple assignments of tuners to the same unix devnumbers. See http://www.ivtvdriver.org/pipermail/ivt ... 00199.html for an exhaustive analysis of the issue.

(See also the thread at http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-user ... 08145.html, which started out the same, but there might be some divergence because of the different developer populations. This is more of a Myth bug than an ivtv bug; the latter could have -perhaps- detected the problem, but not solved it on its own.)