I have a PVR350/us-cable for input and output on R5A16. Everything was working pretty well until this past Monday. I had been seeing this one problem off and on where the picture would loop a second of video while watching live tv, but the audio would continue. But this past Monday after that happened, I exited live tv and went back into live tv and the same problem was occuring, then I tried changing the channel and mythtv said it changed the channel, but I kept getting the same 1 second loop of video and the live audio from the original channel.

So I rebooted. When the system came back up all I've been able to get since is static on every channel. I am thinking of trying to either reinstall R5A16, or install to R5A26 this weekend. I'm only worried that I have 200+ MB of tv I've recorded that I don't want to lose in the reinstall or upgrade.

My questions:
1) Is it possible to install or reinstall without losing my tv shows?
2) Any idea what happened and why I only get static on every channel?
3) Edit- Until I get this static fixed, is there an easy way to disable all recordings? Perhaps setting the tuner priority to negative?

Thanks

1) Do a backup and an auto upgrade. This should preserve all of the information in the database and not touch the data in /myth which is where the actual recordings are.
2) Did you shut it off (cold, no power) for long enough for the firmware to get get cleared (25-30 seconds)? Have you tried using ivtvctl to reset the card and reload the firmware? Have you checked the cable connections and whether the card is firmly seated?
3) Nothing simple springs to mind short of clearing all the capture cards using mythtv-setup.

Thank you for the response. I've shut it off for 5+ minutes. I've tried ivtvctl --reload (IIRC). I've checked the cable connection, but haven't opened the box up to check the seating of the card. I would think that the card wouldn't work at all (the tv out works fine) if it was seated incorrectly.

Unfortunately with this weekend containing Christmas, I'm not likely to actually get to work on my box as I had hoped.

Well if your cable doesn't have a surge surpressor on it you might have taken a hit that way, or the card could just have gone bad. Had any recent thuder & lightening storms or major power events?

I ended up talking to Hauppauge support and sending the card back for fixing. They sent me a working one (could be the same one, not sure). Everything is working now.

I also bought a PVR-150 to record while my PVR-350 was being repaired. Now I use both and record with dual tuners. I was having problems getting the dual tuners working. I had to swap the locations of the tuners in the slots so IVTV would pick up the PVR-350 first, not sure why, but when I did that everything worked.