[pvrusb2] testing pvrusb2

[Abe Shan]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your tip. After a couple of trials, I am able to receive images
and audio using both xawtv and mythtv.

However, the stream resets after every few seconds. And I have to manually
intervene to get the stream back on. I am not sure why this is happening.
The /var/log/messages tells me that the driver is reseting the encoder.

My USB device according to lspci is :
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M)
USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.: Unknown device 8089
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 201
        Memory at ee800000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
        Capabilities: <available only to root>

And my CPU is :
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.26GHz
cpu MHz         : 2289.223

And the video card is:
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV200 QW
[Radeon 7500] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 0f2a
        Flags: bus master, stepping, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ
185
        Memory at f0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        I/O ports at d800 [size=256]
        Memory at ef000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Expansion ROM at effe0000 [disabled] [size=128K]

Clearly, I have all the power necessary for running it. I am not sure why
the driver is not able to get a steady stream. Is there a way to check
whether the WinTV-PVR-USB2 unit is okay? Are there any tell tale signs that
I should be looking for? Any suggestions? Ideas? I am running Dapper with
linux 2.6.18.

thanks!
abe




On 11/5/06, Mike Isely <isely at isely.net> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Abe Shan wrote:
>
> > Mike,
> >
> > Thanks for the tips.
> >
> > To focus the attention on testing pvrusb2, I compiled and tested
> xawtv-4.x.
> >
> > Unfortunately, there still seems to be some trouble. Should the encoder
> > light up when using scantv?
>
> It should only light up when actually streaming.  I don't know if scantv
> attempts to read video data.  (It's been too long since I did this last
> and I don't remember.)
>
>
> > > scantv
> > using device "Hauppauge WinTV pvr-usb2"
> > using input "composite"
>
> That's not right.  The input should be the tuner, i.e. "television".
> There's nothing to "scan" when you're connected to the composite input :-)
>
>
> > using TV norm "NTSC-M"
> > using frequency table "us-cable"
> >
> > Anyway, when I proceed with xawtv, the /var/log/messages registers the
> > following error.
> > Nov  5 21:38:59 shafran kernel: [ 1421.470668] pvrusb2: ***WARNING***
> > device's encoder appears to be stuck (status=000000003)
> > Nov  5 21:38:59 shafran kernel: [ 1421.470675] pvrusb2: Encoder command:
> > 0x81
> > Nov  5 21:38:59 shafran kernel: [ 1421.470677] pvrusb2: Giving up
> waiting.
> > It is likely that this is a bad idea...
> > Nov  5 21:38:59 shafran kernel: [ 1421.470681] pvrusb2: Error recovery
> > initiatedNov  5 21:38:59 shafran kernel: [ 1421.470683] pvrusb2:
> Retrying
> > device reconfiguration
>
> This is unfortunately not out of the ordinary.  It might not be related to
> the scanning problem you are having.
>
> The pvrusb2 driver executes a sort of a handshake protocol when talking to
> the encoder chip (the part of the device creating the mpeg2 stream).  The
> protocol involves the driver setting a few shared memory locations then
> setting some bits in a control register that causes the encoder to execute
> the requested command.  Some time later the encoder is supposed to finish
> that command and respond with some status bits, which the pvrusb2 driver
> will be polling for.  Every once in a while the encoder fails to respond.
> When that happens you get the message above, after the pvrusb2 driver
> gives up waiting.  The pvrusb2 driver recovers this situation by resetting
> the encoder, reloading its firmware, and reinitializing its configuration.
> The whole sequence takes on the order of a second and except for these log
> messages would be hardly noticed.  This only seems to happen when
> streaming is started (not while it is underway) so it never disrupts a
> running video stream.  Anyway, the driver can usually recover this
> situation.  Though I don't really like the fact that this happens, I
> should probably tone down the messages in the log.
>
>
> >
> > Then, when I try to use the 'scan analog' in edit, the program
> seg-faults.
> > Have you seen this before?
>
> No, I haven't seen a seg-fault during scan.  But I'm running an older
> snapshot of that program (and it's been a long time since I did a scan) so
> we might not be doing an apples-apples comparison here.  I'm not going to
> get a chance to try to reproduce this until at least Tuesday night.  It'd
> be great if someone else here using xawtv could perhaps chip in here.
>
>   -Mike
>
>
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