[pvrusb2] Sound Problems

[Mike Isely]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, Santiago Almenara wrote:

> Now I am worried.
>
> I was about to buy the tuner... but I see that 2 persons had problems in such a short time, and they even had to RMA.
>
> I live in Peru and international shipping is not as easy for returning stuff.  (mostly because of customs and the international shipping, itself)
>
> Do these tuners have many problems???
>
> Regards,
> Santiago

Santiago:

Sorry about the reply delay.  I've been on vacation and off the net.  Now 
I'm back and catching up...

Here's the complete history of all hardware issues I've heard about:

1. Several people have told me of rumors of these devices overheating. 
It is true that the device does get pretty warm.  However, the ONLY 
concrete example of this that I've gotten wind of is somebody who stacked 
3-4 of these devices inside of a closed up (i.e. unventilated) box, and 
one or more suffered failures soon after.  In my experience, so long as 
air can freely convect over the top of the device, there shouldn't be a 
problem.  I did a burn-in test once: I took one device and had it capture 
26 hours of TV signal.  The device sat on a desk in open air with no 
special ventilation.  The room was just a room in a house (ambient room 
temp).  It worked flawlessly.

2. I have one device I acquired in November 2005 that suffered some kind 
of problem with the color recovery.  This problem happened from the first 
few minutes of using it.  It would just suddenly "lose the color" and 
start capturing B/W video.  The NTSC colorburst frequency was still 
present because it was visible in the B/W video.  This device got RMAed. 
Its replacement has worked fine.  So far, I'm the only one that I know of 
who has seen this.

3. I have seen one recent report (on this list) of the sound capture 
failing.  No idea why.  But it is the only report I have seen.

4. There is another thread going on here right now about static in the 
audio, but in that case, the user is not using the audio input since he's 
just doing screen captures with it.  Now, I would have expected the 
unconnected audio jack to produce silence not noise.  However he also said 
that audio is fine when he's recording a TV program.  I can test for this 
scenario here (and probably will in a few days, now that I've heard of 
this).  So far I don't have any reason to think this is a hardware 
problem.

   -Mike

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