Ever wonder why it’s so common for somebody to check in a change to make some new product work, causing a regression in the tuner that *you* have? Well, here’s why:
[lightbox title=”HVR-18×0 testing” href=”../../blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/cxboards1.jpg”]
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All these boards use the exact same driver, despite the fact that they have different core chips and only some of them have an onboard MPEG encoder.
To make matters worse, look at all the different input types:
[lightbox title=”HVR-18×0 testing” href=”../../blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/cxslots.jpg”]
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Even getting all the equipment together to do the testing is a PITA. I spent twenty minutes digging through boxes for a RCA L/R audio to 1/8″ audio converter.
It’s trivial to accidentally make a change which causes a specific input type to break on an unrelated card. For example, the latest batch of patches for the HVR-1850 broke audio when using the tuner input, but only on the cx23887 based boards such as the HVR-1800.
I’ve got the luxury of having a number of different board variations (gathered by borrowing some boards from Steven and getting others from Hauppauge). In most cases though, an individual contributor only has a single board (the one he/she owns and is trying to get working), and thus it’s much more likely to cause a regression.
Anyway, I’m in the process of incrementally testing each of these boards, and hopefully when I’m done they should all be working on all the different input types. I appreciate everybody’s patience in that I know a number of people have been complaining about the various problems for a while now…