[mythtv-users] PVR-350 purple and green monolith

[Jeff Simpson]

On 4/18/06, Paul Fowler <Paul.Fowler at reuters.com> wrote:
> My PVR-350 was working fine, I had X-Out, Sky TV capture on the 350, and
> two other DVB capture cards.
> I have FC4-1653, I use ivtv 0.4.x and Myth 0.18.
> The Watch TV and Playback all worked fine.
>
> At the start of april I took the plunge and upgraded to Myth 0.19
> And something in the process upgraded ivtv to 0.4.4
>
> However now, all recordings work fine, I can preview them in Media
> Library, but when I watch Live TV or Media Library playback I get a
> weird purple and green blocky (non-animated) monolith slightly offcentre
> against a black background. Basically nothing will playback, (nothing
> except a couple of old pvr350 recordings from last november). However
> the frontend gui is working fine and X-Out is fine too.
>
> In my attempts to fix this I have tried rolling back to an older version
> if ivtv, but repositiory issues have prevented this as dependancies have
> moved on also the atrpms repo thinks I need to upgrade to a smp kernel,
> which I doubt very much.
>
> I have rebuild ivtv driver from source code 0.4.4 from ivtvdriver.org
> I have checked the firmware filenames and init mpeg file (which are in
> /lib/modules as I have no hotplug directory and used ln -s to link all
> names so that I only have one version of each file)
>
> I also noticed that after playing the old pvr 350 recording, newer dvb
> recordings do play ok but squashed to the same space which the monolith
> occupied. On my 14inch tv the monolith is about 15cm tall, 4cm wide and
> is located just right of centre.
>
> Also can anybody confirm the correct settings for pvr350 output in myth,
> I may have inadvertantly switch on the wrong mpeg library. I do have use
> pvr350 output hardware ticked on.
>
> Any help appreciated.

I saw something similar to this when I upgraded. The upgrade changes
the startup script to use user "myth" to open the video in/out
devices. Despite giving that user the correct permissions to the
device, it still gave me purple and green video (in my case, repeating
tiny copies across the top of the monitor)

I edited my /etc/init.d/mythbackend script to run as root again and it
was happy.

Have you tried using anything outside of myth? ie, cat somefile.mpg >
/dev/video16 or cat /dev/video0 > somefile.mpg to make sure the device
works on its own?

 - Jeff