greetings.

I've got my box working pretty dang well now and am trying to tweak a few minor issues. Here's one:

A handful of channels on Comcast cable appear to be slightly out of tune or maybe underpowered and so while watching live tv through myth, they can be fairly static-laden. When recording on these channels (65,66,67) the image is unwatchable (though my kids suffer through somehow) due to excessive pixellation and "Chatter" for lack of a better term. I've applied a variety of basic filters to these channels with no improvement. FInally, I've fiddled with the fine tune a bit and tuned it till watching live tv is MUCH better, though not perfect. NOw when I record these channels, the recording is watchable, but is black&white... So, it appears I can get unwatchable color, or tolerable black&white. any suggestions?

thanks

Andrew

_________________
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe
Hauppauge 350/150
ASUS V9520Magic/128MB Geforce FX5200
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L200R0 200GB
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton

I have no idea why this would make sense, but you never know. It sounds to me like the old cable scrambling they used to do prior to digital cable. Maybe if you contact Comcast they can help you. Again, I'm no expert, but just a thought.

--Jeff

How is your feed hooked to your capture card? I had problems like this when the PVR was daisy chained with the VCR and in about the same range of channels. Cleaning up my wiring (everything gets it's own feed straight off the splitter) solved a number of quality issues.

Don't know if you sorted this one, as this is an old post, but in my very recent build of my upgraded myth box I discovered after scanning for channels some were unwatchable. Some were perfect mind, but the ones that were not were visually garbled.
I solved this by ensuring dma properly was turned on.
It appars that if you are not getting info shifted around quickly enough some channels suffer.

I followed the guide to optimising your harddrive on the wiki!
In short you neeed to edit
/etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh

and at the end of the file after the 'Enable DMA' line you will find a line reading something like

/sbin/hdparm -qd1/dev/hda

(hda is your hard drive)

change this line to this

/sbin/hdparm -qd1c1u1m16/dev/hda

Hope this helps...
(Code taken from the page by Nick Anderson)