On 06/04/10 21:42, Andy Walls wrote:
<snip>
>>    cx18-0 843: Video signal:              present
>>    cx18-0 843: Detected format:           NTSC-M
>>    cx18-0 843: Specified standard:        NTSC-M
>>    cx18-0 843: Specified video input:     Composite 7
>>    cx18-0 843: Specified audioclock freq: 48000 Hz
>>    cx18-0 843: Detected audio mode:       mono
>>    cx18-0 843: Detected audio standard:   no detected audio standard
>                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>                                                 |
> And this is what makes me pull my hair out. ----+
> 
> Same card, same chipset, same firmware image, in the same PC and mobo,
> same TV channel with the same RF signal, same analog tuner assembly, and
> one '843 core detects the audio standard and the other '843 core
> doesn't. :P
> 
> If you have controlled the signal levels properly and used good cable
> and grounding, the difference has to be in the analog tuner can.  Either
> it has gone bad, or it is picking up a lot of noise from somewhere.
> 
> Come to think of it, a bad analog tuner assembly could explain the red
> screen.
> 
> Anyway, if *everthing* is the same, and one card works and one card
> doesn't, there's nothing to be done in software - except implement
> workaround that may not work.  I *speculate* that you have a dying card.
> 
To continue contributing to sales of Rogaine...

This evening I finally got a few minutes to rub together, so I've done
an experiment.  I shut down mythbackend, then started rmmoding as much
of the cx18 stuff as I could positively identify using modules.dep.  The
idea was to "shut off" the cards with nothing else significant going on
with the system, like a power-down or reboot.  Then I modprobed cx18 and
checked the status of both video devices.  Both came up properly, both
had sound.  Tempting fate, I decided to try a reboot.  Both cards came
up properly, good sound, no red screens.

Which makes me think back just a little bit...

A few weeks back we had a bit of a heat wave here in Vermont - 80s even.
 The heat broke, and everything started cooling down after Friday, June
5th, in quite a marked way.  (some 20 degrees cooler)  Looking back I
see that I reported that the card "came back" on June 6.  It came up OK
just now, and it's still cool.

I'm wondering if there's a temperature effect here.  Temperature is
quite a significant factor in semiconductor performance.  I'm going to
keep an eye on this, and if sound goes away when it gets hot, I'll turn
on the A/C for a few hours to cool the room and let the system thermally
soak, then try again.

To put this back into the "dying card" mindset, there are many failure
and degradation modes in semiconductors, but one of those mechanisms is
a threshold shift (Vt-shift) that tends to slow things down.  Higher
temperatures generally slow things down.  I'm wondering about putting
them both together.

How is audio initialization done?  I know I've seen you give parameters
before to "slow things down", but don't know if that's relevant in this
case.  The weather is warming up toward next week, so it might be a good
time to try some of these experiments.

Dale Pontius

_______________________________________________
ivtv-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users

Reply via email to