I've just observed some extremely bizarre behavior. Does anyone have a clue or (even better) a workaround? This is the second time I've seen something like this in as many days.
I'm running ivtv 0.4.1-r1 in a Myth backend that's got 5 PVR-250's in it. I was recording the same RF signal twice---once as four 30-min episodes, and once as one 2-hour "episode", from a PBS affiliate that sometimes has a marginal signal. Thus, the first two tuners of the 5 were recording the same thing. The other 3 were idle. I was -also- recording the same signal on a TiVo. The PBS feed glitched in a way that looks like the transmitter lost video sync momentarily; it faded back over the course of a couple of seconds, with distorted color for the next few seconds. -One- of the PVR-250's signals (the one recording a 2-hour segment) was destroyed from then until the end of the recording (about 30 minutes). The upper 1/4 of the video had a periodic (about 1 Hz) diagonal pattern of dots that flashed on for a frame or two. The dots were fairly large and blocky---superpixels. Maybe VBI data that was being "smeared" digitally into the signal? It also had an audible pop in the audio. The other PVR-250 did -not- have this problem---it recovered from the sync loss and continued to give good video. (Unfortunately, that's the one that was capturing individual episodes---but the PBS affiliate has crappy scheduling late at night and most of the episodes were offset a few minutes from when the Myth started & stopped each one.) [I don't recall right now if it popped, but I could find out if anyone thinks it matters.] The TiVo also observed the glitch; its audio continued uninterrupted, but its video froze for 1-2 seconds and then jumped discontinuously (fairly standard behavior when it rides out a loss of video sync). My recording from this PBS affiliate was similarly destroyed last night, but last night, I wasn't recording on multiple Myth tuners, nor did I have TiVo coverage, so I thought the transmitting station had some sort of dying digital VTR. Now I know better---it's an ivtv issue. Do later versions of ivtv have fixes that should prevent this from happening? Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before? I'm reluctant to upgrade unless someone thinks this has been actually fixed, since (except for this) I have a "working" and stable system. And if I do upgrade, what's the recommended version? 0.4.2? 0.5.x? Thanks! P.S. Note that I -am- capturing closed-captioning data on all tuners, in case it matters. (US NTSC cable feed.) I'm doing this by running "ivtvctl -b wss,cc -x 1 -d /dev/video0", etc, on each tuner just before Myth's backend starts. _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
