Preston Crow wrote:
On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 17:14 +1000, ffrr wrote:
I chased video glitches from my DVB setup for ages, and with a lot of
help from the list, I finally nailed it. It was the Si 3112 SATA
controller chip doing nasties on the PCI bus and corrupting the mpeg
stream from the DVB card.
This would correlate with your observation that it is worse with
system load, in particular disk access.
Not only that, but I bought a new SATA drive at about the same time as I
switched to the DVB drivers.
Did you ever get a good resolution?
Yep, swore long and loud at the manufacturers of such shoddy hardware
:-) , then built a whole new dedicated Knoppmyth system on an old 850MHz
box, using a 250GB IDE drive I went out and purchased.
Absolutely perfect recordings every time now !
I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, which includes on-board a
Silicon Image Sil 3112A controller; the same one you found to be your
problem.
Yep, many people have since told me horror stories about them.
I suppose that if I can't fix some setting somewhere, then my best hope
is to buy a separate PCI SATA card with a different controller chip;
that would at least be cheaper than buying a new 400GB hard drive.
Well, what initially happened was, I was getting corrupt file systems
frequently. When I realised it was the controller, I found a BIOS
update that included/added a parameter to extend some obscure timing.
This had 4 setting from memory, something like 10us, 20us, 30us, and
1ms. That rang alarm bells as the doco said to try the first 3 and if
corruption still occurred, set it to 1ms. This is soooo much larger,
but guess what. I needed it set to 1ms to get reliable hard disks.
I am 99% sure that this new setting made my DVB glitches much worse. I
hadn't really noticed them before, as I think they were so infrequent, I
just put it down to signal noise. But now, they were intolerable. (This
was all using Mythtv under a Mandriva 2005le install)
I built a quick Knoppmyth install on an old 15GB IDE drive I had around,
and with the Sata drives disconnected, and obviously all other hardware
still the same, I had perfect pictures. This is the point that I built
the separate, non-SATA machine.
I still use the SATA machine as my daily desktop, and it is now
reliable. Just no good for DVB cards.
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