[mythtv-users] Suicable PCI replacement for a failing PVR150

Jan Ceuleers jan.ceuleers at gmail.com
Fri Apr 6 16:56:19 UTC 2012


On 06/04/12 17:51, Andrew Stadt wrote:
> On 06/04/2012 11:04 AM, Jan Ceuleers wrote:
>> I went for HVR1900s, since they are more future-proof both from the
>> point of view of connectivity (USB rather than ever-less-available
>> PCI), and because they are dual-technology (analogue and DVB-T).
> Thanks for the info Jan,
>
> If you don't mind me asking, how well are they supported? Any
> issues/problems/etc? Drivers work out of the box, or need to be compiled
> (not an issue, but nice to know ahead of time)? Don't need the
> ir/blaster support, have that covered through other means.

They are well supported by the pvrusb2 driver. They take a while to 
initialise at boot, so you may need to delay starting your backend until 
they are up and running.

Full disclosure: I've been having occasional problems whereby USB 
connectivity became unreliable (about once every couple of weeks or so). 
This began only when I added the fourth tuner to the system, prior to 
that I had perhaps two occurrences per year (i.e. with only three of 
these tuners or fewer).

When it became irksome enough to do something about it I asked the kind 
folks on the pvrusb2 mailing list, and we all agreed that given my 
symptoms (which I haven't fully described here) the issue is most likely 
due to the USB subsystem in the kernel rather than the tuners or the 
pvrusb2 driver.

I have since installed a 3.3.0 kernel and have not had any problems. 
That's now a couple of weeks ago and I haven't had problems yet. Too 
early to say whether the problem is solved though.

More info about the boot process. If your distro is using upstart, then 
please refer to 
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Upstart_mythbackend_Configuration#Delay_starting_the_backend_until_all_tuners_have_initialised 
. As you can see, I only had 2 HVR1900s when I wrote this

HTH, Jan


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