I installed R5C7 on a box with a MCE Kit PVR-500. Initially the picture quality was pretty terrible. I followed the instructions here http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=CompileIvtv , which improved things a little, but I still had to use my imagination more than I'd like while watching TV. I also went out and got an RF amp, and this again improved things but I'm still left with a picture that has a decent amount of noise or fuzz or whatever. It makes it difficult to watch sports on TV. I've checked everything out and I'm not cascading my splitters or anything like that. Any addtional points that I might be missing?

Does a regular TV hooked directly to the same connection (unscrew it from the PVR-500 and connect it to the TV) give a good picture? We've had several people solved problems like this by replacing bad cables...

Have you checked for other sources of interference out side (poorly shielded network cable, video out cable, ...) or inside of the case? Possibly removing or disconnecting anything else you can while debugging this?

Have you made sure that the box is grounded properly? A good surge protector/power bar should include LEDs that signal any grounding or polarity problems.

Have you checked the other possible frequency sets for your locale?

Have you tried using the fine tuning stuff in the channel editor?

Have you dumped and looked at the settings from the driver/card using "ivtvctl -a"?

That's about all I can think of for now...

I am also having a problem with image quality on a PVR-500.

Upgraded from a PVR-150 to a PVR-500-MCE on R5C7. Had zero problems with the PVR-150 on R5C7. I used to have to recompile IVTV before R5C7 to get the PVR-150 working. Great work!

After installing the PVR-500, I didn't get any picture. Followed step four here, http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=CompileIvtv, that got me a fuzzy picture. Tuner is now recognized as type 68 instead of type 4, which I believe is Samsung instead of "not found". I tried playing the recording on another computer to rule out a decoding problem. No help.

I upgraded to the recommended firmware here, http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Firmware. No help.

I upgraded to IVTV 0.4.5. No help.

I tried scanning for channels instead of downloading them from Zap2It. No help.

Hooked up a TV to the coax, picture is fine. The box is grounded according to the power strip.

Performed a fresh install of R5C7, had to do step four in http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=CompileIvtv, to get a picture. Still fuzzy. Tried the IVTV and firmware upgrade again, no luck. Deleted and added my tuner cards again. No luck. Always end up at the same place, tuner works but picture is awful. I'm kinda stuck at this point. Not quite sure what to try now. If I can post any log files let me know. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

(and thank you KnoppMyth and MythTV creators for great open-source PVR software!)

Yup. PVR500s using the drivers from R5B7 and R5C7 have a fuzzier picture than previous releases and produce larger files for the same resolution and bitrate settings. I have not found a solution yet.

It also true that cabling can be a problem and if you do not have a reference from an earlier knoppmyth version, you should look at that first.

Here is thread I started on this issue:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10163

Playing with Dynamic Noise Reduction (DNR) settings on the card helps a little, but there is something else going on.

You can get info on the DNR settings in this thread:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... vtvctl+dnr

_________________
ECS 741GX-M Rev 1.0A
SIS chipset
(GQ3131 aka Fry's $99 special)
Semperon 2200
1G RAM
Nvidia FX-5200 svideo out
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500 MCE (Phillips)
200GB ST3200822A Disk
40GB WDC WD400BB-22JHC0
BTC 9019URF Wireless Keyboard/Mouse

Have any of you tried the 0.4.6 prelease?

Also, in 0.4.4 have you tried the cx25840 patch which uses the ivtv version of that module rather than the v4l version?

Just compilied the 0.4.6 driver, it improved the video quality marginally, probably the best improvement yet. However the audio, which before had suffered the occasional glicth or pop, is now skipping very badly. I do not know of the 0.4.4 cx25840 patch you speak of, but I would like to try it.

Thanks for your help.

I thought that the picture got better when I set the LiveTV settings to be 720x480 instead of 480x480. Can you confirm that?

Well you've already done more or less the equivalent with 0.4.6pre so it's probably not worth it. There's a link on the CompileIvtv page on the wiki to the appropriate thread here. If you've got 0.4.6 the easiest stunt is to copy the Kbuild file from that into the 0.4.4/driver directory, the do run "make && make install" for 0.4.4.

I'm actually back on 0.4.4 at the moment, since 0.4.6 makes a couple channels glitchy on my PVR-150. The firmware doesn't seem to be an issue, so it's probably something in 150 specific parts of the driver.

From the IVTV mailing list:

Thought I'd post an update on some findings:

The picture quality using 0.4.6 is much better for me than 0.4.4, tried a couple different channels and I am actually quite satisfied with the results. The only problem I had with 0.4.6 was with audio. I tried playing a few mpgs back using a variety of methods and had some interesting results.

VLC: Video plays smoothly, audio occasionally pops
WMP10: No video, audio is high pitched and choppy
Quicktime: Program refuses to play file
XBox with XBMC: Video and audio play perfectly!!!

I'd only been testing the recordings with VLC previously, I watch 99% of my recordings through my XBox as a frontend, so I effectively have a 99% working solution until the tuner bugs are hammered out, which sounds like its just around the corner.

Thanks for all the help!!!

Having done my research, I've found that I also have a 500 of the Samsung variety. I installed 0.4.6, and am pretty pleased with the results.

Has anyone tried IVTV 0.7 yet, or anything newer than 0.4.6?

Is there a real fix to these problems yet?

I got desperate a few days ago and installed subversion, and pulled down the bleeding edge latest code. After a successful make install, I rebooted. Now I get a lockup every time ivtv tries to load. And I'm hosed in that I've tried to reinstall 4.7, 4.6, 4.5, 4.3, etc... but there is something the make install changed on me that I've not found yet.

I've not had time to go dissect the Makefile yet to figure it out, but it is certainly frustrating.

I expected to have issues with the latest code, but did not consider that I would have problems reverting.


Turns out that I may not have the Samsung issue after all- When IVTV was running, it reported:

I'll have to pull the card to make sure, and that is not a simple task.

To clarify, my svideo in port quality seams a little less than desired, but the audio quality really sucks, making the box unusable still.

I installed the SVN ivtv 0.4 tree and now have video tearing on some channels usually at the beginning of a recording, but sometimes anywhere in the recording.

Sound has not been a problem for me on my 500.

I looked at going all the way back to ivtv .39 which is the last version that worked well on my setup (PVR-500 Phillips chipset), but I found it will not compile with the kernel source supplied with the R5B7 release.

_________________
ECS 741GX-M Rev 1.0A
SIS chipset
(GQ3131 aka Fry's $99 special)
Semperon 2200
1G RAM
Nvidia FX-5200 svideo out
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500 MCE (Phillips)
200GB ST3200822A Disk
40GB WDC WD400BB-22JHC0
BTC 9019URF Wireless Keyboard/Mouse

I have *mostly* fixed my fuzzy picture problem on my PVR500. See this link:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... highlight=

_________________
ECS 741GX-M Rev 1.0A
SIS chipset
(GQ3131 aka Fry's $99 special)
Semperon 2200
1G RAM
Nvidia FX-5200 svideo out
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500 MCE (Phillips)
200GB ST3200822A Disk
40GB WDC WD400BB-22JHC0
BTC 9019URF Wireless Keyboard/Mouse