[mythtv-users] Re: New HD3000 drivers

[Dan Lanciani]

Brian Merrill <bmerrill at sfcn.org> wrote:

|>New drivers have been released for the HD-3000 card.  Some cards took
|>slightly longer to initialize and the driver tried to communicate before
|>it was ready.  The new HD-3000 driver fixes this problem.  If you had
|>problems with the card before, it should be fine now.
|>
|>In the next week or two there will be yet another driver release that
|>will have improved 64 bit and MP support.  The buffer will also be
|>doubled and we should see the Buffer Overrun errors pretty much vanish.
|>
|>For those who want to follow driver development, I will be setting up a
|>site on freedesktop.org once their server comes back online.  I'll post
|>the information here along with the maillist to join if you are
|>interested in following or helping driver work.  One improvement I'm
|>personally looking forward to is right now we send the full 45Mb stream
|>over the PCI bus.  When you have 2-3 cards and are saving these streams
|>to disk that adds up quickly, and this is partially responsible poorer
|>playback on amd based systems.  Another goal will be to get the driver
|>accepted into the kernel.  
|>
|>--Brandon
|>
|
|I have been having the above problem (I think) where myth would fail as 
|soon as "Watch TV" unless I run dtvsignal /dev/dtv 38 first and then 
|launch mythfrontend.  Is there a place that the "released" driver you 
|mentioned can be obtained until you get the freedesktop.org site setup?  
|I don't see the new driver on the pchdtv.com download page.  The latest 
|I see is dated 08-November-2004.

I don't think that is the result of slow initialization.  I've had the
same problem with an HD-2000 since I installed it.  For "Watch TV" to
work, dtvsignal really has to set a currently-broadcasting channel.  If
it were just giving the card more time to initialize it shouldn't matter.
As was discussed before there seems to be a combination of bugs involved:
the backend isn't able to set the default channel, the backend gives a
timer error if an ATSC tuner isn't set to a broadcasting channel when
you ask the frontend to "Watch TV," and the frontend hangs on this error.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl at danlan.*com