[pvrusb2] // tvtime, PAL, s-video and the all pervading blankness //

[Mike Isely]

Julian:

Are you also the one who was chatting on #v4l and #pvrusb2 about having a 
PAL 24xxx device?  Sorry I wasn't around to respond.  During the day here 
(Chicago CDT time, GMT-5) I'm at work and not active on IRC, though I stay 
logged in so that I can review the activity later.  If you are that 
person, e-mail me back privately and I can shed a lot of light on the 
firmware issues you had.  mkrufky tried to help you there (and what he 
said is exactly right) but your dropping out of IRC a few times probably 
just confused things.  I'm also curious about this because you would be 
the first person I know of outside of NTSC to have one of these newer 
devices.

As for the stuff mentioned below....

On Tue, 16 May 2006, Julian Oliver wrote:

>
> hello pvrusb2 list,
>
> after a bit of a mess trying to find the right firmware i've just installed the pvrusb2
> drivers and firmware for a PAL WinTV-PVR USB2 box i bought today.
>
> when trying to run tvtime i get blue output and the error:
>
> 		$> sudo tvtime
>
> 		Running tvtime 1.0.1.
> 		Reading configuration from /etc/tvtime/tvtime.xml
> 		Reading configuration from /home/delire/.tvtime/tvtime.xml
> 		xcommon: No window properties found for EWMH.
> 		videoinput: Card failed to allocate capture buffers: Invalid argument
>
> in the tvtime window itself are written the words:
>
> 		pvrusb2: invalid argument
> 		Cannot open capture device: /dev/video0. no such file or
> 		directory

tvtime is not going to work.  Period.  The problem is that tvtime expects 
to operate a device delivering uncompressed video frames, but the PVR USB2 
device delivers mpeg2 stream data.  A V4L app using this device needs to 
be able to decompress mpeg2 back to uncompressed video frames. 
Unfortunately this limits your choice of apps.  The pvrusb2 web page lists 
viable choices (including xawtv).


>
> xawtv seems to see it fine however, as does a raw mplayer /dev/video0
> regardless neither mplayer or xawtv will see anything other than noise
> for the 'television' input and complete blankness for s-video input.

Yes, with xawtv and mplayer you're getting a lot further.

Usually if you see noise on the TV input then this indicates that the 
device is basically working but you're just not tuning a live station. 
And causes for bad tuning include (a) a tuner type which is not defined, 
(b) wrong video standard setting, (c) wrong frequency table in the app 
(e.g. "broadcast" vs "cable"), (d) the app simply hasn't defined any 
stations, or (e) there wasn't actually any signal coming in the coax. 
Just a couple days ago I helped someone whose problem turned out to be 
(c).  A year ago cause (a) was common but not so much anymore (and if you 
have the 24xxx device I suspect you're probably fine with the tuner type).

With xawtv I suggest you run scantv to set it up for the correct frequency 
table and to detect what stations you can receive.  With mplayer you need 
to use the sysfs interface to adjust the frequency.  The driver by the 
default tunes to US broadcast channel 7 when it starts, which obviously 
won't do you any good in PAL territory (I only did this to help my own 
debugging).  You need to echo a valid frequency into 
/sys/class/pvrusb2/ctl+_frequency/cur_val before you'll be able to view a 
station with mplayer.

I'm a bit puzzled by your getting nothing with the s-video input.  If you 
got snow on the television input then the rest of the device is probably 
working fine, but for s-video (or composite) the situation is even simpler 
so that should have worked.


>
> as far as i can tell tvout should be working perfectly.

tvout?  This device does not have a tvout.  Oh wait.  You mean the tvout 
of your video card?  Can you just try to plug a DVD player or VCR into the 
s-video or composite input of the device?  That would at least give you a 
way to confirm things.


>
> out of interest i bought the card strictly for making videos of desktop
> content, not to watch tv. i write 3d applications and xvidcap and
> istanbul are not suitable for capturing this sort of material.

So your intent is to use the tvout of your video card and feed that into 
the PVR USB2 device?  That should work.


>
> specs:
>
> 		kernel 2.6.15
> 		radeon 9600 on fglrx drivers
> 		gcc-4.0
>
> here's the output of lsmod | grep pvrusb2 (excuse any unneccessary
> modules:
>
> 		pvrusb2               121244  0
> 		v4l2_common             4608  2 pvrusb2,em28xx
> 		v4l1_compat            11780  2 pvrusb2,em28xx
> 		videodev                6912  3 pvrusb2,em28xx,pwc
> 		tveeprom               12240  2 pvrusb2,em28xx
> 		firmware_class          7424  4 pvrusb2,cx25840,pcmcia,ipw2200
> 		usbcore                99332  8
> 		pvrusb2,em28xx,usb_storage,pwc,usbhid,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd
> 		i2c_core               15376  9
> 		pvrusb2,saa7115,msp3400,em28xx,tda9887,tuner,cx25840,tveeprom,i2c_i801

A long time ago there was a pvrusb2 user who reported some kind of 
conflict between the pvrusb2 driver and the em28xx driver.  I don't think 
it was ever substantiated.  But just as an experiment you might want to 
try just once with the em28xx driver unloaded.  If that turns out to be a 
cause we can dig into it further.  This is just a guess.


>
> here's the syslog output when i plug in the device:

     [...]

The syslog output looks fine.  Your tuner type looks good too so the 
tuning issue discussed earlier is not caused by (a).

   -Mike

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