Yesterday I spent most of the day testing the saa7164-stable tree on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) 64bit Desktop. In previous tests here, here, here and here everything largely went well on both ATSC/QAM and DVB-T, on our both 32 and 64bit platforms.
The change history in the saa7164-stable repository shows that the tree hasn’t needed (or had) any digital TV related bug fixes in 2 months.
The last major piece of development work took place on May 19th in saa7164-buffering, in which I took a completely different approach to managing DMA buffering in an attempt to rule out some issues that could occur on busy systems with excessively high latency.
Over the last two months, on and off, I’ve been successfully running -stable in a second MythTV system, mirroring my production Myth schedule. I’m declaring victory. Personally speaking, if my production MythTV backend had a PCIe slot, I would of been using -stable in my production environment since June.
So, it’s no surprise to me that yesterdays set of test, each lasting 30 minutes, using a single HVR-2250 on -stable, that consisted of running a mixture of oddball/unusual LiveTV, background recording, overlapping background recordings, using every combination across both TV tuners in an attempt to find breakage, all tests completed without error. No failures.
I think saa7164-stable is ready for merge into the mainline kernel.
Yet, I still have reports from some people that the driver hard locks the system. I want to encourage anyone who has tested or is running -stable to speak up on this thread (again). Your opinions count.
Tell us, do you think -stable is ready for merge into the mainline kernel? If not, describe your specific issues, configuration and platform details. Let’s see if the community can help figure out why it’s completely reliable for most people and not for others.
As always, your feedback is always appreciated.
@Steven
Posting here for completeness..
Ok – have had another re-occurrance of the problem – with the timeout tree. The system was very heavily loaded (recording 3 streams, commerical detecting another, and streaming for playback on a frontend), and it locked both tuners hard. rmmod/modprobe cleared it again.
Moving to the saa7164-dev branch to help assist in confirming your patches are ok, as per your post http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=678
@Daniel, OK, thanks for the -timeout tree feedback. I’d be interested in hearing about your saa7164-dev testing.
Hi There.
I’m looking at using the 2250 for a linux based project and one critical aspect is that VBI is supported from an analog source, we absolutely need the Closed Captioning. Is this is currently working?
Thanks!
VBI is not supported.
Hi Steven,
I understand analog recording is not working on the HVR-2250, and that Hauppauge unfortunately won’t let you work on it in your official capacity, to complete support of this card in Linux.
I know what you have done is entirely on your own time and I appreciate it. I am in a position to buy 2 of these cards, one for a Win 7 PVR and one MythTV PVR. But since this card offers no advantage currently for me over a HDHomeRun, and I prefer Linux, I believe I will be purchasing HDHR instead. I hope you will take this anecdote back to your leaders at Hauppauge.
I would support you personally, say $20 to work on it. I wish I could do more. But since your last update on your blog is just over a year old, I imagine other people have discontinued supporting your 2250 work, and therefore it isn’t really interesting you, and my support would be for naught.
Thanks for the feedback Colin, nothing much I can say to be honest.