On Thu, 21 Oct 2010, Jim Peters wrote: > > I have 4 of these tuners, 3 of them are the 24xx series and 1 is a 29xx > series, at one time they all worked great and I am not sure what happened to > cause this but at some point the 29xx tuner started outputting black and > white > video. At first I suspected a hardware failure and thought maybe it was in > the > analog tuner part of the card so I switched it over to using the composite > side but this didn't help. As a last resort to chalking it up as a failed > piece of hardware I tried it on a windows machine and it works fine there so > I > am under the impression that this must be a driver/firmware issue. Since my > other 3 tuners don't have a problem I assume that there must be some part of > the driver/firmware that only affects the 29xx series cards and the problem > lies > within this, I have no idea where to look for a solution, any help would be > appreciated. >
This is a very strange issue. There's really nothing in the driver that can cause the video to go B&W. The only thing that I can come up with is that the 29xxx device is being configured with the wrong video standard. Most analog video standards use pretty much the same scheme for encoding luminance and sync info - the differences are just parmaeters: the number of scan lines, interlacing, and vertical refresh rate. But when color TV first became common so long ago, the standard got "forked" and different countries adopted different means for encoding a color subcarrier. That's really the big difference between NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM. The outward effect of this is that if you have the wrong video standard set, one likely result is that you'll still be "close enough" that the hardware can manage to get a lock on the sync pulses and the luminance but will fail to identify the chrominance / hue components of the signal. Result: Black and white video. Now with that said, everything you do to configure the 24xxx devices should be the same as for the 29xxx device. They do have different hardware so I suppose another possibility is that they're all configured wrong but the 24xxx devices have chips that are successfully autodetecting the video format in spite of what they were told. Just guessing, but those are things I'd look for. It's also possible that a bug has crept into the saa7115 driver in v4l-dvb which has gone unnoticed - that driver is unique for the 29xxx devices. It's not like that hasn't happened before. To test for that, I'd try to boot an older kernel, preferably one that you knew worked before. As for firmware issues, that's pretty unlikely here. The 29xxx and 24xxx devices can share the same mpeg encoder firmware so if you got that wrong they'd all be busted. The 29xxx and 24xxx devices use completely different FX2 firmware (the file names encode their type so there's no collision on systems with both device types). But the FX2 firmware is basic to controlling the entire device and if you corrupted the 29xxx version then it just isn't going to work at all. There's actually nothing in the FX2 firmware that can interfere with color vs B&W video since the video standard info is sent directly to the individual chips over I2C and since the video data itself never actually gets into the FX2 processor (it's a dog-slow 8051 - no way could it keep up with that sort of data stream). > > Operating system Mythbuntu Linux 10.04.1 Automatic Daily builds > > mythtv version .23 > > Kernel and CPU Linux 2.6.32-25-generic on x86_64 > > Processor information Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 270, 4 cores > > Real memory 3.75 GB total, 504.48 MB used A long time ago I acquired a 29xxx device that had a problem where it would only produce B&W video. No matter what I did with it, the damn thing would never produce color. I spent 6 WEEKS trying to figure out what kind of pvrusb2 driver bug could cause this and found nothing at all. Then I tried it on a Windows system - and got B&W video. And that's when I RMA'ed the device back to Hauppauge. However you said you tried in Windows successfully so that pretty much proves that the hardware is fine. I'd look hard at the video standard to which it has been configured. -Mike -- Mike Isely isely @ isely (dot) net PGP: 03 54 43 4D 75 E5 CC 92 71 16 01 E2 B5 F5 C1 E8 _______________________________________________ pvrusb2 mailing list [email protected] http://www.isely.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pvrusb2
