ivtv 0.3.7

Being interested in Xv support on the PVR350 for playing DVDs and videos in formats other than MPEG2/nuv, I started playing with the latest ivtv and ivtvfb drivers.

I installed ivtv 0.3.7, X driver 0.10.5 and the latest Hauppauge firmware, recommended with the dynamic DMA buffer code in the new ivtv driver.

I had a few problems at first - ghosting was corrected by using ivtvctl -c dnr_temporal=0 (it defaulted to this with the 0.2 driver) and I had a few lockups after removing the 16Mb vm reservation I needed for 0.2. I've now put the vm reservation back and the box has been stable for a few days.

Xv works ok with some videos and not so ok with others. I've tried mplayer and xine and both display video in the same way.

One thing I noticed was that my amp started emitting high-pitched clicks/pops at random intervals with 0.3.7. I almost thought I was imagining the problem but I also lost sound completely at one point, needing a reboot to fix.

I noticed a patch to revert a tda988x audio 'fix' that has been causing some users to lose sound and I'll try this to see what effect it has...

Slave backends

I started having a few issues with MythTV 0.18.1 after moving from my all-in-one setup to the distributed master/slave setup.

If you ever need to setup a slave backend, you may find you need to edit /.mythtv/mysql.txt aswell as ~root/.mythtv/mysql.txt. I found that the former was read if mythbackend was started as a service and the later was read if I ran the command by hand!

I've seen a few problems where the slave and master appear to dissagree on the availability of the slave's grabber. Logs fill with errors trying to access /dev/video devices and frontends thinks that the slave is free to watch LiveTV when it isn't. However, I haven't been able to reproduce the errors with debugging enabled! Usually things go wrong in the middle of the night when both systems are unattended...

At first, I had debugging enabled on the slave but now I have it enabled on the master backend as watching LiveTV generates vast amounts of logs on the slave with debugging on full.