pvr-350 comes and goes? [solved]

[nordic bro]

I run the s-video and 2 audio cables from my dvr to my capture card and it works great but I don't have the cables connected the whole time, only when I want to record something to my computer.

then another time I'll hook the cables up and all I get is a black screen in mplayer and a kind of steady/screechy noise for audio. first thing I check is the cables and they're solid. although I know input 1 is s-video I'll do 'v4l-ctl -i x' cycling through inputs but of course there's nothing on any others.

if I do nothing but boot into standalone xp the card is working fine.

boot back to linux and it's black screen/screech audio.

I have noticed when I have the black screen prob if I 'v4l-ctl -K 1' I'll get a really awful color picture so something is working: http://s30.postimg.org/aacej1vkx/pic.jpg

back to -K 0 and it's black/screech audio.

I've pored over dmesgs, internet searches, pretty sure the ivtv*/v4l pkgs are ok, card is ok, kernel modules are ok/loaded, cables ok but can't figure this out. if it's something like an irq problem does someone know how I'd troubleshoot that? or maybe someone has run into this where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and something else is causing the trouble?

btw when it works on linux it works fine, this black/screech audio either occurs all the time or not at all. iow I boot up and maybe it's working the entire time, another time I'll boot up and no matter what I try I can't get it working.

[Schnulli]

hi nordic

let me ask , you are using AMD CPU or Board and/or ATI right?
some years ago i had some trouble with black frozen screen on my amd, thats why i fired amd completely.

[nordic bro]

seems this problem is due to my wm, e17, although I'm not sure why/how. I ran across a tip to use 'fuser /dev/video0' to look for device conflicts and discovered the enlightenment process's PID was showing plus PIDs for all xterms I had open. I don't know why that would be since I wasn't even trying to use the card during this but booted into twm, retried mplayer/pvr and it worked perfectly fine each time I tried.

I've used enlightenment for ages (e17 - e19 and back) where the card has worked ok at times so don't know if this is some kind of race condition or even why enlightenment is doing something with /dev/video0. I tried a brand new user and totally default e17 setup but had the same trouble. would anyone know if there's some more or less common reasons a wm would be I guess taking control of a video device which then prevents something like mplayer from being able to use it?

[Ant P.]

Sounds like your TV card might be defaulting to the wrong region, at least for the video output. That wouldn't explain the audio though. Try experimenting with the settings in qv4l2.

One thing I've noticed with mine is changing card settings in whatever program I use to play the stream has no effect, only the stuff in v4l-utils works for that. (Another thing I've noticed is that V4L stuff in general feels really fragile... so good luck.)

[nordic bro]

hard to think this specific situation would happen to others but figured I'd close this out by saying it was the emotion pkg. it's some peripheral enlightenment crap I think only needed by terminology - all the time I wasted troubleshooting ivtv/v4l2, kernel modules and whatnot, then stumbling on the cause in the most unexpected of places, arrrgh!

I guess emotion is so terminology can do fancy stuff in its terminal window but unless emotion is poorly thought-out/implemented I don't know why my pvr device gets attached to the main e proc, not to mention getting passed on to xterms of all things. the other a/v on my machine works 100% (mplayer, web stuff, audacious, etc.) but somehow emotion ends up locking/creating conflict for the pvr device(s) for some reason. buh-bye emotion!