Mailing List Archive

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These and other questions are answered in the HOWTO. Did you read
it?

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>These and other questions are answered in the HOWTO. Did you read
>it?

It's not obvious... I'd read it a while ago and looked for new sections on
the PVR250, but there's nothing in the index (except for an irrelevant
troubleshooting topic) so I'd assumed there wasn't anything new. It's
hidden away.

Anyway, it doesn't answer my questions :-)
(or, if it does, I can't find where)

- is the PVR250/350 code reliable enough yet? Do I need to be a Linux guru
to install the drivers? (for me reading the HOWTO it looks as if I do need
to be, but someone who's done it (and who isn't a guru) might be able to
give a subjective view). From comments in this mailing list it looks like
people have lots of problems with it.

- Can MythTV handle 3 capture cards in one PC? The HOWTO says 'one or
more', but has anyone actually tried it with 3? Until hardware MPEG
encoders were supported it was unlikely that a PC could handle 3 so it
might not have been tested. If the answer is 'it should but no one knows',
then I'll know not to spend too much effort on it if it doesn't work, but
if someone can say 'I've done it and it works fine', then I'll spend more
effort getting it working.


Paul VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
support@pscs.co.uk http://www.pscs.co.uk/

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On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 02:33:49PM +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> - is the PVR250/350 code reliable enough yet? Do I need to be a Linux guru
> to install the drivers? (for me reading the HOWTO it looks as if I do need
> to be, but someone who's done it (and who isn't a guru) might be able to
> give a subjective view). From comments in this mailing list it looks like
> people have lots of problems with it.

Unfortunately, I would probably be considered a guru, so you might want to
ignore this. If you are willing to stick with stock 2.4.20, it really is
fairly trivial to get the driver working. Take it slow, 90% of the problems
people have isn't with the driver; but rather, getting mythtv to recognize
that the driver is installed. I, on the other hand, wasted several hours
until I noticed that the ebuild installed setup, and the CVS didn't, so I
was still running the old code.

Jeff
- --
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Computer Science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes
-- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002)
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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On Wednesday 30 April 2003 10:43 am, Jeffrey Brent McBeth wrote:
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> On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 02:33:49PM +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> > - is the PVR250/350 code reliable enough yet? Do I need to be a Linux
> > guru to install the drivers? (for me reading the HOWTO it looks as if I
> > do need to be, but someone who's done it (and who isn't a guru) might be
> > able to give a subjective view). From comments in this mailing list it
> > looks like people have lots of problems with it.
>
> Unfortunately, I would probably be considered a guru, so you might want to
> ignore this. If you are willing to stick with stock 2.4.20, it really is
> fairly trivial to get the driver working. Take it slow, 90% of the
> problems people have isn't with the driver; but rather, getting mythtv to
> recognize that the driver is installed.

And that's no longer an issue with current CVS -- I've got my own copy of the
v4l headers included now, so unless you don't tell it that it's a hardware
encoder card, it's hard to mess up =)

Isaac

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> >These and other questions are answered in the HOWTO. Did you read
> >it?
> It's not obvious... I'd read it a while ago and looked for
> new sections on the PVR250, but there's nothing in the index
> (except for an irrelevant troubleshooting topic) so I'd assumed
> there wasn't anything new. It's hidden away.

Section 3.1, hardware and section 19,
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-19.html#ss19.10 should have a
fairly good explanation of requirements.

> - is the PVR250/350 code reliable enough yet?

It's CVS code; reliability is not guaranteed. It's kernel-mode
driver code; by definition, it may totally trash your system.

> From comments in this mailing list it looks like people have lots
> of problems with it.

And the ones that don't probably don't say anything. I got my PVR250
running within about an hour. For the most part, people have
problems because they don't have V4L2 support either available as a
module or compiled into their system. Once that's in place, driver
installation is a matter of following the steps in the ivtv driver
documentation.

If you're not comfortable with running CVS code, you should probably
wait.

> - Can MythTV handle 3 capture cards in one PC?

Can MythTV handle it? Sure. Can your CPU? That's the better
question. I don't know that anyone has that many capture cards in
their machine, mostly because you'll have to make a tradeoff in
resolution to run that many cards unless you have a very fast
processor, and the delta between getting 1 really fast processor with
3 cards in it vs a bunch of smaller/cheaper boxes may not be worth
it. You're probably going to start running into PCI bandwidth issues
as well.


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> > - is the PVR250/350 code reliable enough yet?
>
>It's CVS code; reliability is not guaranteed. It's kernel-mode
>driver code; by definition, it may totally trash your system.

Note I said 'reliable enough', not '100% reliable' :-)

I'm getting the feeling that it probably is 'reliable enough' at the moment.

>If you're not comfortable with running CVS code, you should probably
>wait.

I'm game to give things a try. I am currently running latest CVS code. The
PC is purely for MythTV, so if it all collapses, it's not too much of a
problem...

> > - Can MythTV handle 3 capture cards in one PC?
>
>Can MythTV handle it? Sure. Can your CPU? That's the better
>question.

The CPU should be able to - TOP shows about 20-30% for recording on one
card, and about the same for playback. So, adding another card should still
leave 10-20% free for the MPEG2 card which should be enough ;-)

> I don't know that anyone has that many capture cards in
>their machine, mostly because you'll have to make a tradeoff in
>resolution to run that many cards unless you have a very fast
>processor,

An Athlon XP 2800+ is pretty fast. As I said, I don't think it's been a
possibility until the MPEG encoder support came along. I certainly wouldn't
try to do it with 3 'dumb' tuners.

>and the delta between getting 1 really fast processor with
>3 cards in it vs a bunch of smaller/cheaper boxes may not be worth
>it.

Hmm, not sure there..

> You're probably going to start running into PCI bandwidth issues
>as well.

Yep, I was thinking of that, PCI & hard disk speed might become a problem.
Hard disk speed I can probably resolve (I've got a SCSI RAID controller
lying around ;-) RAID 0 across 4 U160 disks should be fast enough), but PCI
bandwidth is a limiting factor.

(Anyone know if/how you can measure the utilisation of PCI bandwidth? ;-) )


Paul VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
support@pscs.co.uk http://www.pscs.co.uk/

>> > - Can MythTV handle 3 capture cards in one PC?
>>
>>Can MythTV handle it? Sure. Can your CPU? That's the better
>>question.
>
>The CPU should be able to - TOP shows about 20-30% for recording on one

>card, and about the same for playback. So, adding another card should
still
>leave 10-20% free for the MPEG2 card which should be enough ;-)

With a nforce2, barton 2500xp, and 768mbs of ram with a pvr 250 I am
90-94% IDLE while watching a 30 minute time shifted live tv segment.
That's just nuts. 4% of that comes from running top over sshd to monitor
the machine too lol. I would be worried more about my hard drive keeping
up with 3 streams going down and one coming up than my cpu anymore. Of
course I don't think the current driver supports multiple pvr 250's yet,
but if it doesn't it will probably be coming soon, they seem to be
working pretty hard on it.


>> You're probably going to start running into PCI bandwidth issues
>>as well.
>
>Yep, I was thinking of that, PCI & hard disk speed might become a
problem.
>Hard disk speed I can probably resolve (I've got a SCSI RAID controller

>lying around ;-) RAID 0 across 4 U160 disks should be fast enough), but
PCI
>bandwidth is a limiting factor.
>

Yup yup.