[pvrusb2] pvrusb2-mci-20070114 radio support - stereo?

[Rick Macdonald]

Still no stereo, but some information.

Something I did in the last day or two caused my PVR-150 to revert back 
to mono, causing me to get suspicious and start testing all over again.

I'll spare you all the gory details, so here's the short story. At some 
point my fingers were getting raw from screwing and unscrewing the cable 
connectors from the PVR-150 and PVR-USB2. I had a 2-way splitter and 
eventually got out the wire antenna that came with the USB2, but I was 
still moving connections around. I finally got a 4-way splitter to be 
able to hook up everything at once (2-TV; 2FM) and did away with the 
wire antenna. The cable signal should be better, right?

Well, unbelievably, the two FM radio stations that I listen to are MONO 
feeds over the Cable TV service. I switched to the wire antenna, and I 
get stereo back on the PVR-150. I think it was just luck that I had 
stereo on the PVR-150 after booting Windows and back to Linux. I must 
have switched to the wire antenna at the same time.

And what an unbelievable coincidence that pvrusb2 actually _did_ have a 
bug resulting in FM mono when I first came along!

I've written a nasty note to Shaw Cable, but not too nasty that they 
don't take an interest and fix my stations.

However, I still only get mono from pvrusb2. I have a Windows laptop set 
up to run the PVR-USB2 now, so in a few seconds I can switch the pvrusb2 
USB cable and headphones from the WinXP (stereo) to the Linux machine 
(mono). It's quite clear that the Linux side is just mono.

As for the change in sound when I echo Stereo/Mono to the 
ctl_audio_mode, the difference is that the Mono mode removes all the 
hissy FM sound giving a cleaner stronger signal, but the Stereo setting 
is still mono.

I don't know what else to try. I don't have much experience with 
programming device drivers, but I have been programming for 25 years and 
I've been running Linux for 13. If you have things that I could try for 
you (snippits of code etc) just let me know. I know it's 
difficult/tedious to troubleshoot/investigate remotely by making entire 
tarballs each time.

...RickM...