Q1: What's the best, most stable ivtv version for a PVR350 w/TV-out?

Perhaps my forum searching is lacking, but it's not clear to me what ivtv driver version is best to use (my spec below, if relevant). I've tried 0.3.1x and the most recent 0.2.0-rc, 0.2.0-rc3d [Edit: and rc3e], and both are not very stable.

I frequently get screen freezes and some other transient display issues. Freeze is 100% predictable on Menu->Edit Recording while watching a recording, but also randomly on, say, skip to next commercial marker.

Does anyone have very good experience with a particular driver or expert knowledge of which should be best?

Q2: What's a good workaround for these freezes, to restart the ivtv driver somehow?

I added an option to restart mythfrontend from the remote, but this doesn't reset the ivtv driver etc. where the problem does appear to be. It has been helpful, when I forced a freeze with Edit Recording, and then restarted mythfrontend, I could just make out the text of the main menu (no colour, no images), and could limp down to KnoppMyth->reboot.

However, what I'd really like to do is to restart/reload the ivtv driver and anything else required (full X11 restart?). Is this possible? It's discussed here, but I don't see a real solution. When ssh'd in I tried 'init 3' followed by 'init 5', expecting run level 3 to be without X (isn't that a convention?), but that doesn't appear to be the case - most of the runlevels seem to be identical.

If necessary I'll tweak the setup to allow a reboot on power button double click or something, but rebooting is a pain, and stuffs up any current recordings. Mythbackend seems to be stable.

All help or comments appreciated! Thank you.

hey! my ivtv freezes sometimes when i jump to the next marker or just skip forward even, but if I SSH into the box it works again, without doing anything once I'm there! it's weird

watching.... skipping... freeze! cursing... going over to other computer, ssh root@mythos (that's the computers name) password: ********* [enter] and on that enter, it un freezes. this happens to pretty regularly, but it always fixes it, kinda weird.

very odd!

I'm hopeful that switching my card to another slot has made mine more stable. Time will tell... [Edit Feb 08 - nope, hung again]

I'm having the same problem where it locks up when I skip to commercial flag or skip 30. It happens about twice a night and logging into mythweb fixes it (or refreshing mythweb). I tried switching from the farthest PCI slot from the AGP slot to a middle slot (required updating /etc/X11/XF86Config-4) but it locked up since.

Yeah, my PCI slot switch gave me hope which lasted a few days (light use) without a hang, but today it did it again. I didn't realise it had happened either, so my recordings all evening failed too. I haven't found anything suspicious looking in any logs.

Same difficulty here - PIII 700, PVR-350 w/ TV out, Knoppmyth V4R5
100% lockup on edit while playing, intermittant freeze on 30 second skip.

If I SSH or login to mythweb on the box, good to go.
It certainly becomes a strange routine on skip.. kind of like russian roulette. I've taken to keeping a wireless-enabled PDA next to the remote for the freeze.

I did upgrade the ivtv drivers about a month back, to solve the green tint - tv out problem. I executed the corrupted table fix this morning, we'll have to see if this makes any difference. I'd really love to get the edit recording functional, as I've recently patched nuvexport to support mpeg2->mpeg2 cut only enabled. ( ffmpeg support )
This should allow me to mark commercials on the myth, export out a .mpg from the .nuv, menu and iso it up with DVDstyler and burn!

If the table fix doesn't work, I'll look next into upgrade to V5A10 - the .17 deb changelog talks about "race conditions and freezes in pvr-350 playback"... perhaps this includes me.

Anybody tried this yet?

I (almost) definitely saw mention of the Edit Recording freeze as a bug fixed in 0.17... I haven't been tempted to an upgrade yet though - too much else going on at present...

I don't think the corrupted table issue is related - at least I had no corruptions when I ran all the checks.

Upgraded to R5A10 last night.. I broke my remote ( LIRC for grey hauppauge ) and tv-out for the pvr-350 in the process, but fixed the freeze on record problem. I successfully entered edit mode via 'e' and create some cutpoints. Can't say anything about the skip-freeze issue yet - not enough playtime.

I'm following threads in the forum about the remote and tv-out.. good information in there.

I like the new look of blue.

So I'll kick this thread off again. I've recently upgraded to R5A12, PVR-350 with TV-Out. Everything going fine except I was hoping to fix the lockups watching both live and recorded TV but I still get them. Unfortunatly it doesn't fix for me by sshing or /http into the box.

Usually I have to kill hte frontend (by using a power button hack) start it back up, get the almost imposible screen to read and then reboot the box.

Has anyone found a fix for this problem yet?

-Lane

Some of the recent 0.3.2 builds of ivtv have had osd lockup related fixes applied. Some evidence of progress has been posted, but not to the "eureka, everything works fine now!" level, I think.

-brendan

My "production" box (the one the wife uses...it needs to be rock solid) is using R4V5. I use it with my pvr350 for tv-out. What has to work for me 100% of the time is the tv recording feature. The other stuff that has been updated are not nearly as important. Therefore, I recommend R4V5 of Knoppmyth and then my "pvr.pl" script posted on the hints/tips forum to get a stock install working with tv-out from the pvr card. Seems to be rock solid for me.

I've been playing with the latest drivers for the last few weeks and seem to have found a pretty good one in 3.3x I've only done preliminary testing, but was able to channel skip, pause, jump and skip all around in a few shows with 0 lockups or hangs. This is a huge improvement for me. I'll make another post after a few days of it being "wife tested".

This was a very recent file (5am yesterday). Please don't mess with these drivers unless you know how to fix your mythtv box with a boot CD.

http://www.ivtv.tv/releases/ivtv-0.3/

-Lane

Update: Watched 3 hours of tv tonight. Not one mishap.

This driver is bar none, the best one I have used. It's been wife tested since sunday and has been rock solid. Not a single lockup, hang, you name it. Woot. She's finally off my back!

There is one small problem but it doesn't effect performance. I get massive amounts of these in /var/log/messages while watching a recorded show. I know I've seen a thread on this so I'm not going to worry about it for now. Just wanted you to know.

May 4 08:05:32 tvbox0 kernel: ivtv: ENC Stream 6 OVERFLOW #76069: Stealing a Buffer, 262528 currently allocated

-Lane

Lane,

Try turning off VBI in myth settings. Not sure how to do that but that's what this error is indicating (yeah I know it's not very discriptive), that VBI isn't being read properly.

Yeah, the last 10 or so ivtv-0.3.? releases have had lots of VBI work. And still, chris indicates that VBI (and/or Close Captioning/CC) should be turned off both in mythtv as well as possibly via one ivtvctl statement per device (e.g. /usr/local/bin/ivtvctl -d /dev/video0 -x 0 ) in the right place (e.g. set_ivtv_params ) if you're having problems.

-brendan