On 13. okt. 2013 18:14, Torsten Mohr wrote:

Hello,

i have a VDR up and running, the SW works fine so far (at least i think so).

Some recordings are half-corrupted, have breaks inbetween, bad sound, etc.

The bad-quality problem is not related to a certain channel, i wonder how i can track this down.

My hardware: 2 (TWO !) Terratec Cinergy PCI cards. <-- two cards MSI C847 MS-E33 board

I gave up on this card. It has been about 2 years since I last tried it, but the driver (mantis) had (and most likely still has) serious problems with some DMA timeouts, IIRC. Running irqbalance di help a little bit, but in the end I replaced the cards with something less broken.

YMMV.

On 13. okt. 2013 23:30, Torsten Mohr wrote:

These cards worked fine in my previous VDR, i never experienced problems there.

But on the other hand, what cards would you recommend? A double tuner would be preferred (DVB-C).

I am very satisfied with my SAA7146-based cards, although they only have a single tuner. I had to import these from Germany as availability of DVB-C cards are very limited in Norway. I could not find anyone selling anything else than that Cinergy.

Am 15.10.2013 08:20, schrieb Petri Hintukainen:

On ma, 2013-10-14 at 19:53 +0200, Vidar Tyldum wrote:

...

On 13. okt. 2013 23:30, Torsten Mohr wrote:

...

These cards worked fine in my previous VDR, i never experienced problems there.

But on the other hand, what cards would you recommend? A double tuner would be preferred (DVB-C).

I am very satisfied with my SAA7146-based cards, although they only have a single tuner.

+1

I've been using SAA7146-based Technotrend cards for ~10 years 24/7 without any problems. That's almost 90 000 hours without driver or HW failures (well, all other parts of the system have been replaced during the years). The hardware and drivers seem to be very robust, but compared to modern adapters those produce lot of heat and take quite much room (and PCI slots). I've tried also several DVB-C/T USB adapters, but those all performed rather poorly ... signal problems, lost recordings, requiring reboots etc.

Here are doing two Satelco EasyWatch (KNC One clones) their job for years, but since my new vdr hasn't got any PCI slots anymore I switched to the cards from Digital Devices/Linux4Media. A (dd)bridge and two Flex modules (=> 4 Tuner) are working for some months now. You just have to compile the driver from the media-build-experimental repository of Oliver Endriss - if you use Ubuntu/yaVDR there is a DKMS package which makes installation easy. They are a bit more expensive than other cards but have advantages: the dual tuner module just needs one cable and it's no problem to connect a second module with a short cable from the antenna output of the first module. And since they are small cards it's just a matter of the slot bracket if you want it full or low profile.

Regards, Lars.

On 16.10.2013 21:23, Torsten Mohr wrote:

Hi,

thanks for your hints so far, but before buying new cards i'd like to clarify if the problem is related to HW or SW.

Is there a way to detect from a recording if it was recorded on card 0 or card 1?

If you are running VDR with --log=3 you will get entries like this in the log:

Oct 16 22:45:00 vdr2 vdr: [5458] switching device 2 to channel 3 Oct 16 22:45:00 vdr2 vdr: [5458] timer 2 (3 2245-0045 'Comedy~TV total') start

This shows you which device was used for the recording.

Is there a way to code this into the recording name?

No need to, just look it up in the log.

Klaus

Am 10/17/13 00:31, schrieb Klaus Schmidinger:

On 16.10.2013 21:23, Torsten Mohr wrote:

[...]

This shows you which device was used for the recording.

...

Is there a way to code this into the recording name?

No need to, just look it up in the log.

Oh, there could be a need to have the recording-device been noted in e.g. the info-file. I had this use case: Several months ago one of my tuners on one of my three identical cards went bad, resulting in drop-outs which caused pixel-artifacts and other errors while replaying. I have not the time to view my recordings soon after recording, so I noticed the bad recordings several months after the first drop-out. And it took me several weeks to find out the "bad card", so for this case it would have been very helful to see via the info-file: Ah, it's device number two which does always bad recodings since April with a little grep. Perhaps this could be an additional feature for vdr-development. :-) And even more helpful would be to notice the name of the card instead of the device number which is subject to change between reboots. Or even both.

Regards, Stephan.