On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 06:52 -0700, Corey Taylor wrote:

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Andy,

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I am noticing an improvement in pixelation by setting the bufsize to
64k. I will monitor over the next week and report back. I am running 3
HVR-1600s and the IRQs are coming up shared with the USB which also
supports my HD PVR capture device. Monday nights are usually one of
the busier nights for recording so I will know how well this holds up.

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Thanks for the tip!

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Brandon

Hi Andy and Brandon, I too tried various different bufsizes as suggested and I still see very noticeable pixelation/tearing regardless of the setting.

I even upgraded my motherboard this past weekend to an Asus AM2+ board with
Phenon II X3 CPU. Still the same problems with the card in a brand new
setup.

I also tried modifying the cx18 source code as Andy suggested and that
made more debug warning show up in my syslog, but still did not
resolve the issue. Haven't tried this yet with the new motherboard
though.

Is it possible that this card is more sensitive to hiccups in the
signal coming from the cable line? Or interference from other close-by
cables and electronic equipment?

When recording/watching Live TV through MythTV, I see that ffmpeg is
constantly outputting various errors related to the video stream. I
can post those here if you think it's relevant.

Shoud I just return this card and get one with a different chipset? Or
do you think driver updates can solve the issue?

I'm happy to hold on to this card if it means I can contribute in some
way to fixing the problem, if it's fixable : )

Corey and Brandon,

I found a race condition between the cx driver and the CX23418 firmware.
I have a patch that mitigates the problem here:

http://linuxtv.org/hg/~awalls/cx18/rev/9f5f44e0ce6c

I think the final form of the patch could be better.  However, this
patch essentially eliminated any artifacts I was getting playing back
digital TV.  I also had positive results running mplayer without the
"-cache" command line for both digital and analog captures.

I haven't tested on a single processor machine, nor in a multicard
setup, but things looked good enough that I thought it ready for test by
others.

Let me know if it helps or not.

Regards,
Andy