Emulation mode testing Round III

[mvallevand]

Martin, I did some quick testing of the 0421 dongle with Live TV and found the functioning much improved, for the most part. I made channel changes with the number buttons only and the changes were quicker, more precise(audio muted more quickly and almost simultaneously with video on change) and I didn't get any freeze-ups. However, after one channel change the video remained frozen but the audio continued to change to the new channel content. I've included the logs that seem to be relevant; if additional info would be helpful please let me know. Thanks

Luckerman

That's great for right now. Feedback from some others will probably be better, given how different your experience has been from the others trying 0415. I am curious if this will turn out to be better or worse in general.

Also, I have never done any testing with scheduled recording events and I think that would be useful, based on what I've saw in your logs. I noticed a lot of RenewLease messages I have never seen amd I'm not sure what this applies to. Are you running the server with a static of dhcp based IP?

Martin

[OscarL]

We have been running 0415 last week and it has been working great. No problems so far.
One thing that I have noticed though that I think is common for all mvpmc dongles is that the TV settings does not seem to be read from memory at startup from power down (power disconnected).
I thought that one of my mvp's was wrongly setup, I always had to go into setup mode and change output from composite to s-video and to PAL from NTCS so at last I booted it up with the hauppauge server and to my surprise it did start alright now, meaning tv-output was set right when starting with hauappauge sw. Any ideas for that?

Regards
Oscar

[sub]

I noticed a lot of RenewLease messages I have never seen amd I'm not sure what this applies to.

These are fairly normal when the user is watching live tv. GB-PVR leases its tuners to clients. Every thirty seconds they renew those leases. If they dont renew, its assumed they've gone away (crashed, rebooted, etc), and the tuner is returned to the pool.

[mvallevand]

We have been running 0415 last week and it has been working great. No problems so far.
One thing that I have noticed though that I think is common for all mvpmc dongles is that the TV settings does not seem to be read from memory at startup from power down (power disconnected).

In one of the mvpmc screen logs you sent me PAL mode looked ok.

ie

Sun Mar 25 17:03:18 EDT 2007PAL mode, 720x576
createfont: (height == 0) found builtin font System (0)
createfont: (height == 0) found builtin font System (0)
screen is 720 x 576

This message should be the same before and after power off,
You can confirm with the killall mvpmc
and just run mvpmc (this message is in the dongle version too)

I thought that one of my mvp's was wrongly setup, I always had to go into setup mode and change output from composite to s-video and to PAL from NTCS so at last I booted it up with the hauppauge server and to my surprise it did start alright now, meaning tv-output was set right when starting with hauappauge sw. Any ideas for that?

Regards
Oscar

The only thing I can suggest for now is to add -m pal -o svideo to your dongle.bin.config

Martin

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Hello Martin,

Great job so far! I've been testing for two days now and it's looking very good. I think I have found a small "problem". When I start select a recording, a screen comes up with the options Play, Delete and Close. When I've watched the recording and I press the stop on my remote, the screen I mentioned is still visible and I have to press another key on my remote to make it go away. This does not happen using the Hauppauge dongle.

Best regards!

[mvallevand]

Hello Martin,

Great job so far! I've been testing for two days now and it's looking very good. I think I have found a small "problem". When I start select a recording, a screen comes up with the options Play, Delete and Close. When I've watched the recording and I press the stop on my remote, the screen I mentioned is still visible and I have to press another key on my remote to make it go away. This does not happen using the Hauppauge dongle.

Just before I start playing a video, I grab a screen capture, which I redisplay after the video finishes. However I believe that mvpmc has a bigger video demuxer so there are a few seconds where gbpvr might send incremental screen updates which I have to ignore. That is what I believe is happening here. My guess is that after 5 seconds this would disappear on its own.

Do you know what plugin or config option is giving you this prompt?

Martin

[Sheik Yerbouti]

This happens with the default recordings plugin. And the screen doesn't disappear on its own. Sometimes I get a black screen in stead of the other screen. In both cases, pressing a key on my remote solves this issue.
Yesterday I also noticed the audio was way out of sync (seconds) after skipping. This happened two times, but I wasn't able to reproduce it.

[mvallevand]

This happens with the default recordings plugin. And the screen doesn't disappear on its own. Sometimes I get a black screen in stead of the other screen. In both cases, pressing a key on my remote solves this issue.

Thanks, that gives me a good start. It also confirms a related post since I've never actually scheduled or made a recording, I know I have got some more testing to do.

Yesterday I also noticed the audio was way out of sync (seconds) after skipping. This happened two times, but I wasn't able to reproduce it.

Yes this is a problem with 0418 and 0423 (no emulation changes). I haven't determined the cause, but I like the two second channel changes I'm getting too much to turn it back just now and Luckerman didn't have success with 0415. I'm hoping this will be better overall . It should resync with the skip back key until I fix it.

Martin

[Luckerman]

I just had a chance to try out the 0423 dongle this evening and it worked very well. Channel changes are snappy, there was no video freezing and no loss of A/V sync. I changed channels in Live TV usning UP/DOWN, numbers and mini-guide and all methods worked equally well.
There were a few glitches. When a recording ended, I had to press a key to return to the plug-in screen. Likewise, when a scheduled recording began I had to press a key to get out of the stopped video. And once changing channels with the number keys I had to press a remote key to finish the channel change. There is still a shadowed screen that precedes the info screen, a little hiccup. But essentially this MVPMC dongle worked just as well for Live TV and playback as the Hauppage dongle, but with quicker channel changes.
Great work, Martin!

[pz1]

Just for the record: The last few days I did test the 0421 version. On my installation the LiveTV and Video stuff seemed better. I did however encounter a problem with Music Library 2(ML2). After two reboots and a reload of the dongle, the playlists always stopped after playing one (or may be in one occasion) two tracks. I did not observe that in the 0409 version. The standard GBPVR dongle still works fine with ML2.
pz