[pvrusb2] Hello; and empty files problem....

[Rod Smith]

On Saturday 03 March 2007 23:39, Mike Isely wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Mar 2007, Rod Smith wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-USB2 for use with MythTV. For
> > the most part, the device is working fine (and thanks to Mike Isely for
> > the driver!); however, ocasionally it runs into a problem. The dmesg
> > output and /var/log/messages file contain the following error messages:
> >
> > pvrusb2: ***WARNING*** device's encoder appears to be stuck
> > (status=000000003) pvrusb2: Encoder command: 0x81
> > pvrusb2: Giving up waiting.  It is likely that this is a bad idea...
> > pvrusb2: Error recovery initiated
> > pvrusb2: Retrying device reconfiguration
> >
> > Thereafter, MythTV records 0-length files, for both the current and
> > subsequent recordings; apparently the error recovery attempted by the
> > driver was unsuccessful or MythTV has problems resyncing after the fact.
> > Unloading the driver and reloading it (via rmmod and modprobe,
> > respectively) fixes the problem.
>
> What's going on with that message is that the pvrusb2 driver has given
> up waiting for the encoder to respond to a command.  When this happens,
> the driver prints the message you see, forces the encoder into reset,
> reloads its firmware, reconfigures the device and then starts it running
> again.  The whole sequence takes a very short time (scale of a second or
> less), and any app streaming at that time basically should not even
> notice this except for a probable glitch in the mpeg2 data stream from
> the encoder being restarted.  So I'm unclear on why MythTV is reacting
> badly here.  Your description is the _first_ time I've heard of this
> particular interaction.

I've only run into this problem a few times, and I only checked the dmesg 
output a couple of those times. On such limited data, it's possible that the 
correlation between the dmesg output and the 0-length files was a 
coincidence. I'll keep my eye on it to gather more data.

> The in-kernel 2.6.20 pvrusb2 driver is fairly old.  There have been some
> stability fixes since then.  Those fixes are already on their way into a
> 2.6.20.y kernel release but you might want to try building the
> most current standalone driver and see if that helps the situation.  I'm
> not sure if it's going to help, because none of the changes I've done
> were to specifically address the symptoms you are describing.  However
> it can't hurt to try.

I may try that in the next couple of days, then.

-- 
Rod Smith, rodsmith at rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux, FreeBSD, and networking