[pvrusb2] Can't get Hauppauge HVR-1950 to work

[Mike Isely]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2008, Lars Maersk wrote:

> Thank you, Yusik!!
> 
> Upgrading the kernel solved the problem on the digital side. I still have
> the issue on the analog side. (Can't play more than 5 mins without frames
> starting to break).

Yes, for the digital tuning problem you likely got bit by the recent 
instability there in v4l-dvb.

For the analog side, well that's interesting.  I normally don't use 
mplayer in that manner but now that you've pointed it out I'll play 
around with it and see what happens.  It would good to verify this and 
add it as a documented means to use the driver.

Generally for just testing the driver I run mplayer in its "dumb" mode 
and use the driver's sysfs interface to tune it.  That method is known 
to work well.  Another known good method which works entirely inside of 
a single app is to use xawtv.  And of course there's mythtv, but that 
isn't really a very good choice if one is just trying to verify the 
hardware or the driver.

Another thing you can do is this:

1. Use sysfs to tune the card to a known good analog frequency

2. cat /dev/video0 >/tmp/foo.mpg

3. Use your favorite media player to play back /tmp/foo.mpg

That approach has the advantage of reproducibility and it separates 
issues involving the media player with issues involving the pvrusb2 
driver.  Obviously this is not something you'd want to routinely do but 
it's a good tool to help diagnose problems.

Have you looked at the usage web page for the driver?  Try here:

http://www.isely.net/pvrusb2/usage.html

  -Mike


-- 

Mike Isely
isely @ pobox (dot) com
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