Archives | April 2009

Testing of the 89519, 89619 and 89609 DVB-T models was a success. I've modified the TDA10048 driver to handle multiple input frequencies and I now force all bridge drivers (saa7164, cx23885 and pvrusb2) to specifically pass the I/F frequency to the TDA10048 during attach. Looking good.

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Had Tuesday off from work. Spent a couple of hours writing code at a coffee house for a nice change in scenery. Issued a PULL request for the HVR-950q regression, and did more xc5000 merge work. Spent most of yesterday trying to figure out why my Pinnacle 801e successfully found 24 channels in a Kaffeine scan before the xc5000 power management changes, and why it only got 11-14 channels with the new changes. It turns up I uncovered a race condition in the dvb core in the kernel, which caused the tuning request to not be forwarded to the tuner. All you needed was a dumb channel scanner that kept...

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Yesterday was pretty productive. I did a pull request for the Dvico FusionHDTV7 patch that has been pending for a week or so. And I got the Terratec Cinergy T USB XS working before lunch (and added support for the remote control). Spent pretty much the rest of the day trying to figure out why the kernel was hitting an OOPS on the HVR-950Q every time I unplugged it. A regression got introduced a couple of weeks ago. Ick. Going to try to make the big push today and finally wrap up the xc5000 work. Will need to retest with all the devices, which is a PITA. Fortunately, I own most of them now so I won't...

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Testing started badly, the HVR-2200 demodulators would not achieve lock. Boo! Speculation surrounded the 7164 internal DIF. The tuner is driven from either the DIF or the TDA10048 demodulators, but not both. The belief was that the DIF (which was unprogrammed) and the demodulator were both trying to drive the tuners AGC, essentially confusing the demod. In theory, just program the DIF correctly to avoid the issue. This turned out to be bogus, although an important issue that will have to be dealt with when analog support is addressed. The bug/feature was related to incorrect sample rate programming...

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HVR-2200 DVB-T testing begins today.

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A second day of successful MythTV recordings. I think we're in good shape. I did remove some spurious debug messages that were flooding my logs. From the 'Bizarre Factoid of the Day Dept.': Of all of the states in the US this site has never been visited by anyone living in the state of Wyoming. Really? A quick fact check of US Census Bureau shows the estimated 2007 population as 522,830 people.

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The results are in: All of yesterdays scheduled recordings worked perfectly, no errors. Six recordings are scheduled for today. Anyone want to predict the outcome? Also, I've added support for model 88061 to the driver.

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OK! I now have a MythTV backend configured and running with the HVR-2250 on US digital cable. Sweet! Using multi-rec I have 4 virtual encoders covering the two digital tuners. All of my recordings are established and scheduled and the mythweb Upcoming Recordings view certainly looks busy enough to test the driver, with multiple overlapping and back to back shows in the mix. Some comments on configuration: MythTV-setup configuration/installation was easy, it was no different to any other ATSC/QAM card configuration. Great! No magic required for the SAA7164 tree and DTV. It took 2 minutes. (Unrelated:...

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A couple of updates for you: 1. I'm waiting to hear back from NXP. They are reviewing an older slice of the SAA7164 tree and determining whether I can release it to the public. 2. I'm going to start some real-life MythTV testing tonight with the HVR-2250. Specifically, I'm going to setup a new myth box with multi-rec on US digital cable. Using both digital tuners I'm going to mirror my primary MythTV backend. I tend to record 4 or 5 shows per day so thats 80-100 per 50 shows per week. Any duration or stability bugs show start to show themselves pretty quickly. I'll keep you posted...

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If you have any of the following model numbers then your product will definitely be supported on the first public tree. HVR-2200: 89519, 89619 and 89609. HVR-2250: 88001, 88021 and 88041. Fixed a bug related to rmmod'ing the driver after it failed to register dvb correctly.

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