On Sunday 30 October 2005 22:41, Christian Iversen wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I have a brand new PVR500 (MCE) card. I have some questions in this
> regard. Please, if you can answer even just one question, I would be
> very grateful if you would take the time to answer me. If something
> isn't completely clear, please let me know and I'll improve the
> description in any way needed.
>
> Information first, questions later:
>
> lspci gives:
>
> 0000:02:08.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc
> iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
> 0000:02:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc
> iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
>
> (any idea why the PVR is on 0000:02, when _everything_ else is on
> 0000:00 ?)
These PVR500 cards have some sort of internal PCI bridge because it is
really two PCI cards on one single PCI board.
>
> dmesg gives:
<snip>
>
> these lines worry me:
>
> ivtv0 warning: Encoder mailbox not found
> ivtv0 warning: Decoder mailbox not found
> ivtv0: Error locating firmware.
> ivtv0: Error -12 on initialization
> ivtv-iTVC15_16_mpg2_encoder_card: probe of 0000:02:08.0 failed with
> error -12
Me too. The first unit can read the firmware but when the driver looks
for a specific magic number (the mailbox address) it cannot find it.
The same action works fine for the other unit. I recommend that you try
to test this PVR500 card in a Windows PC. If I had to hazard a guess
I'd say that the memory to which the firmware is uploaded is possibly
broken.
> it seems that something fails, yet I can still watch television on at
> least one head. But maybe this error message is not the real problem?
>
> firmware md5:
> 3a4803384f749d644ee1f1ca9dcb12fa /lib/modules/HcwMakoA.ROM
> 5f5fa240ada73c3565f5f7de4c7b5138 /lib/modules/ivtv-fw-enc.bin
>
>
>
> 1) Is there any important difference between the regular version and
> the MCE version? - i.e, are they both supported?
both are supported.
>
> 2) Shouldn't the two heads on the PVR500 register as video0 and
> video1? I currently only get video0 (+ 24/32)
Yes, but the first unit cannot be initialized and so does not appear.
>
> 3) Is it possible to use one or both heads as plain YUV grabbers? Is
> that what video24/32 is for? I can't get it to work. Here's how it
> fails:
>
> ioctl(6, VIDIOC_REQBUFS or VT_DISALLOCATE, 0xbfb841d0) = -1 EINVAL
> (Invalid argument)
>
> (I get now that video24 has RAW audio. But what's video32 for then?)
video32 is for raw YUV but the V4L buffer API (VIDIOC_REQBUFS) is not
implemented.
> 4) How come the card seems to "stop" or go into some kind of idle
> mode when not used for a while? For instance, if I haven't watched
> anything on it in a days time or so, I can do this:
>
> $ ivtv-tune -f831.25
> /dev/video0: 831.250 MHz
>
> No signal it seems. Indeed, mplayer /dev/video0 gives 100% black
> frames, without sound. If I do
>
> # modprobe -r ivtv && modprobe ivtv
> $ ivtv-tune -f831.25
> /dev/video0: 831.250 MHz (Signal Detected)
>
> It reports that there IS a signal on the very same frequency, and
> mplayer gives a pretty good picture with sound and perfect sync.
>
> Isn't that some kind of error?
Never seen this before. Can someone reproduce this?
I don't know enough to answer the remaining two questions, so I leave
them to someone else.
Hans
> 5) What are the possibilities for using transcode to further compress
> the stream, perhaps into mpeg4? I'm having trouble finding an input
> plugin that can grok the video and audio delivered by the PVR500
> card.
>
> 6) Is it correct that the DNR filter either does nothing much if
> dnr_temporal is low, or creates weird artefacts if dnr_temporal is
> high? Shouldn't it do some sort of smoothing?
>
> Thanks for reading the whole mail :-)
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