On Sun, 2010-05-30 at 10:56 -0400, Dale Pontius wrote: > Last week the audio died on one of my hvr-1600s. I'm limping along on > one at the moment, but don't plan to continue that way. > > Time to start looking for a replacement? Or is there something I can do > to bring back the sound?
Maybe. Does the audio line input still work for sound? When tuned to a known good channel, what does v4l2-ctl --log-status show for the detected Audio Standard on each HVR-1600? > We had an early morning power outage. I brought the system back up, and > because everyone else was asleep, when I was checking for "red screen" I > had the sound turned off, and didn't notice any problem. My wife > noticed when she tried to watch one of her shows, and had no sound. I > rebooted and brought sound back, but only that once. Next boot, no > sound, and full power disconnection doesn't bring sound back, either. > (Full power disconnection has always brought back "red screen" to full > function.) Given all the problems people have reported with braodcast audio decoding by the stand-alone CX25843 and the CX23418's integrated CX25843 core, I'm under the impression the core doesn't perform well with the RF signal characteristics cable companies or STB's seem to provide. The CX25843 and CX23418's integrated CX25843 had never given me a problem with OTA broadcast analog signals. > In another week or two I'm taking the system down to change some other > components, and at that point I'll replug both hvr-1600s, to see if that > helps at all. If it doesn't, it's time to order. Blow the dust out of every slot while you're at it. > What to order? > > I don't remember what model hvr-1600 I have, but a little quick > searching gives 1101, 1178, 1183, and 1199, all at slightly different > price points. The 1178 and 1199 look more like what I've got - the 1101 > and 1183 seem to be missing my IR/audio mini-jacks, having what look > like a pair of RCA jacks (stereo audio?) instead. From what I can tell: > The 1101 comes with no remote, seems to have 3 antenna inputs. > The 1178 looks most like what I've got. > The 1183 has a separate USB remote, again 3 antenna inputs. > The 1199 looks like what I've got, but also has FM. > > Is another hvr-1600 really the best thing to get? I'm set up for it, > and it meets my needs pretty well. At the moment I'm really only using > the analog side, and experimenting with the digital side. I'm also on > Comcast, and have no idea when they're going to do something annoying. Well, PCI bus equipment is being phased out in favor of PCIe in the consumer market. Finding newer card designs (i.e. PCIe) with good analog support under linux is hard. (Do you want reliability and usability, or do you want maintainability. ;] ) Boards based on the CX2388[578] PCIe bridge chips can have raw analog hookups and can also have an onborad CX23417 to perform hardware MPEG compression. However, Linux support for these boards for analog video is well, barely useable. The CX2388[578] also has essentially an integrated CX25843 as well, so any analog sound decoding problems you have now (caused by external factors), these chips may also exhibit. USB is a nicer choice in my opinion. External to the PC case means less EMI affecting the tuner. Also they are easily moved from one machine to the next for troubleshooting, etc. If you want hardware MPEG encoding from a USB device with essentially the same "guts" as the PVR-150 or HVR-1600, the HVR-1950, supported by the pvrusb2 driver, comes to mind. http://www.isely.net/pvrusb2/pvrusb2.html (FM radio not supported under linux.) If you want H.264 compression in hardware from a USB device, people have been very happy with the HD-PVR. Note that the HD-PVR appears to be the only consumer product currently available that lets you caputre analog HD (resolutions better than 480i). This unit doesn't have a tuner, so you'll need to feed it either baseband Composite video, S Video, or Component video, and basedband audio. This unit probably offers a longer usable life, as it makes one's video capture setup more modular (the tuning function is handled by a VCR, STB, or something else, the bus interface is USB) so this unit can stay as a usable component as TV tuner and PC IO bus technologies evolve. And the wiki of course has information: http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Device_Information http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Video_capture_card > Incidentally, regarding the "red screen", which I've reported before: > At this point, the "red screen" appears to be something that happens at > boot time, I have no solid evidence of a properly working system that > subsequently went into "red screen" mode. Full power-off, either unplug > or the "hard" switch on the power supply in back, has always fixed it. > One possible, slight correlation... I have grub set for a 30-second > boot delay. Pressing "enter" to speed boot might aggravate "red > screen", and waiting for the full timeout may make it less likely, but > once it has hit, it takes a full power-off to recover. > > Thanks, > Dale Pontius _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
