[vdr] Re: DVB-T based systems - does anyone have one that really is usable ?

[Gregor Lawatscheck <gpel@mpex.net>]

At 09:40 12/05/2003, you wrote:
> Well this is something I hadn't thought of. When vdr goes into its restart 
> loop (when recording and watching), it does run for about a
> minute before disaster happens. Could it be EPG scan ? Since I live in the 
> UK and the EPG is, umm, next to useless, I was going to try
> the xmltv thing (if I could ever get the dependencies sorted out) and if I 
> do this I can EPG scan altogether, right ?
>
> So perhaps my next experiment is to kill, or at least slow right down EPG 
> scan ?
Sounds like an interesting experiment - maybe it is EPG related after all 
but I think I've tried setting all EPG settings in channels.conf to 0 just 
to make sure it's not that. However completely pulling the code might be a 
safter solution to test this.

1.1.13 and a 0.9.4 driver is pretty stable here if all you're using is 
DVB-T (with either one full featured or via a full featured DVB-s 
card).  Only once in a while does it fail to tune to Channel 4 or very 
rarely ITV 2. Guesses are it's statmux related (basically VBR for DVB) as 
it never happens on BBC-1 which is apparently at a fixed bitrate.

The black screen problem has been there ever since the very first newstruct 
driver and 1.1.13+. I've tested some more today - it's definitely not a 
firmware issue by itself. All firmwares with the exception of Aug 30 2002 
work fine with 0.9.4 and channel-switching. However firmware newer than Apr 
15 2002 isn't supported by the 0.9.4 driver if you're intending to use 
DVB-s as well.

The Aug 30 2002 firmware is notable because it manages to produce the the 
blank screen problem with a 0.9.4 driver. This behaviour seems to have gone 
away in later drivers (i.e. the current one). Unfortunately old firmware 
and new driver doesn't fix the problem either.

I'm currently looking at changes between dvb.c and av7110.c  (the latter is 
the successor to the former in newstruct) and possibly other changes that 
happened when newstruct was introduced. It's odd things break from one day 
to another - should be fixable - it's been in there much too long :). 


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