[pvrusb2] Fuzzy Video using Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2

[Mike Isely]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, cardboil wrote:

> Thanks Roger.  Actually, it turns out that my problem with video fuzziness
> (esp. with fast moving objects) was due to issues with my video card driver
> settings, not pvrusb2.  After some research, I found the right option to use
> in my xorg.conf (to enable xvideo support for TV playback) and that took
> care of the problem.
>
> Now, things are OK, except that my signal reception from the tuner is poor.
> Let me explain.
>
> My cable connection carries both analog cable signals as well as encrypted
> signals for use with digital STBs.  The channel reception is good
> (non-grainy) both with the analog cable coax connected directly to the TV or
> digital through the STB.  However, when I run the coax thru the WinTV PVR
> USB2 tuner, the reception is not very good.  I've checked that my
> frequencies are correct (did auto-tuning using Hauppage's Win TV application
> on a Windows machine to obtain the frequencies).  But, for some inexplicable
> reason, the picture captured by the tuner is rather grainy.  Sometimes, the
> signal is so bad that there is a hissing in the audio and sometimes even no
> audio at all on certain channels.  Note, when I use the tuner with a
> Hauppage's windows driver and viewer application, the reception/picture
> quality is very good.  So, it leads me to believe that may be my settings
> for the pvrusb2 driver are not right.
>
> Any ideas or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

I just went through some old messages from you and I see that tda9887 is 
attaching itself to your device.  This is a good thing, but I've been 
seeing some issues here still with tda9887 support.  I can't yet nail it 
down.  I spent half of last weekend trying to understand this.  Sometimes 
it tunes correctly; other times it isn't quite right.  One time I just 
power cycled the device and then it started working correctly.

The tda9887 module is a chip driver for a part of the PVR USB2 device that 
involves demodulation.  If it isn't working correctly it will look like 
bad tuning.  I'm still learning how this part works and it seems that this 
module driver is not always needed (which is why I only stumbled onto this 
problem recently and added support for it).

The tda9887 module is part of the v4l core.  Supposedly it "just works", 
however there might be some module options you may have to add. 
Generally anything you learn about configuring tda9887 in the context of 
other video devices will likely apply here as well.  For example, I 
understand that for PAL tuning, you probably likely will need "port2=0" as 
a module option.  Try reloading tda9887 with that option set and see if 
that helps.  I'm not convinced it will help unfortunately because in my 
testing last weekend, it didn't do me any good.  Admittedly the pvrusb2 
web page needs to be updated with this information but I haven't yet 
because from where I sit things still are not behaving the way I would 
have expected.

   -Mike

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