PVR-500 One tuner works, one doesn't.

[pevo]

Ok, I got an Hauppauge PVR-500 card and am tyring to configure it for mythtv, but I haven't even gotten to that part yet.

gentoo amd64 2.6.15-rc7. ivtv 4.5 (lastest as of this posting)

dmesg detects the card just fine, it uses the newer samsung tuners ( type = 68 ). the probelm is that using mplayer to take a look at the output: /dev/video1 looks acceptable (not great, but good enough), while /dev/video0 just looks like crap. Heavy static, etc.

Everything works fine (again, good enough) on both tuners in windows.

Any ideas? Has anyone even seen this problem before?
Should I upgrade to 2.6.16 or give up on amd64?
Any suggestions for a better dual tuner card?

[dknovick]

a look at the output: /dev/video1 looks acceptable (not great, but good enough), while /dev/video0 just looks like crap. Heavy static, etc.

Hmmm... that's interesting. On all channels or the lower ones. There are some people who are having problems with the first tuner on the PVR500 on the lower channels. They think the cause might be because the FM tuner freqs intermingle with the lower channels

Should I upgrade to 2.6.16 or give up on amd64?

The little I understand between the ivtv tuner versions is this:
0.4 and 2.6.15 the various modules are compiled and loaded in the kernel.
0.6 and 2.6.16 more of the modules are incorporated into the kernel.

So if I had to guess, you probably wouldn't get that much difference between the two.

The 500's w/ Samsung tuner still have their issues (I have one also).

[pevo]

It is that way on all the channels. I was really worred about the hardware potentially being an issue, which is why I installed it into my xp box, where it works just fine.

So, I'm fairly convinced it has to do with the samsung 2121p30a tunners and/or the conextant i2c interface to them. Any idea if the devs actually got thier hands on the datasheet? I know I couldn't find it online anywhere.

I tried the default gentoo ivtv driver, which is a 0.4.2 i think. It gave the same resulsts. In order to get 0.4.5 to work properly I went through the process of ripping out the modules from the kernel (I had them compiled in directly at first) and using the ones provided by ivtv (tuner, tveeprom.. some other(s)). I know it worked as it changed the syntax of the dmesg printk's.

Anyway, I mostly just want to know that others are having similar issues so I don't feel like this will never get fixed and I wasted money on the card.

[dknovick]

It is that way on all the channels. I was really worred about the hardware potentially being an issue, which is why I installed it into my xp box, where it works just fine.

That's good!

Any idea if the devs actually got thier hands on the datasheet? I know I couldn't find it online anywhere.

The last I heard (well, read), was no, they hadn't. Even a call to Samsung didn't help.

Anyway, I mostly just want to know that others are having similar issues so I don't feel like this will never get fixed and I wasted money on the card.

The issues for the 500 w/ Samsung tuners seem to be all over the place (from my reading), but as long as you know the card is OK, I know this one (Samsung tuner) will eventually get set correctly. Especially since none of the PVRs initially worked.

[pevo]

Ah, another group with similar problems:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ivtv-use.../msg01987.html