Forcing or manually allocating IRQs

[bgowland]

I'm trying to get my capture cards to all have an unshared IRQ. By juggling PCI slots, I have my two PVR cards with unique IRQs but am having trouble getting the two DVB-T into any slots where they don't share with either one of the PVRs or with onboard devices.

Obviously being PnP devices, I can't uncheck the 'Use automatic settings' box in Device manager. Anybody know of any way of changing this stuff manually?

Cheers,
Brian

[sash]

check your bios, many boards support, specifically assigned irq to specific pci slots. you can turn off plug an play support there too. also you could turn off acpi ( mind if you do this you will have to reload your computer it will become unstable). but you should have better control of your irq later.

[bgowland]

Thanks sash I tried some of this but no luck. After disabling onboard serial/parallel ports, I tried assigning IRQs 3 and 7 to the slots with the Novas in but they still got the OS-assigned IRQs that I was seeing before. I then told the BIOS that I wasn't using a PnP OS to see if that would work but still got the same result. I didn't try playing with ACPI.

As it turns out I've sorta reached a configuration that I'm happy with just by juggling the slots that the cards are in. I managed to find the PDF manual for the mobo on the Intel site and it has the PCI Interrupt Routing Map (if in doubt, RTM! ). I've managed to get it so that the 350 and two Novas are assigned unique IRQs and the two tuners on the 500 share (one with onboard sound and the other with onboard LAN) - this doesn't seem to have any adverse side-effects. The object of the excercise was to get the Novas on unique IRQs to prove that failed recordings I'm seeing aren't an IRQ conflict issue - I've managed to prove this now.

Cheers,
Brian

[sash]

how is the recording failing heavy pixeled ??? or just fails to start.. first see if two different dvb programs can record at the same time.. perhaps driver locked if a locked driver you will have to make a special driver package by renaming the driver slightly and making a custum inf file( renaming it approriately and giving it a new name) then re-installing the driver again with this "new" driver for one of the cards

if it records fine with 2 different dvb programs, then how many harddrives? I see with gb-pvr has some problems if only one drive.. it seems to thrash alot.. with other dvb programs I being able to record up to 8 (2-6 meg) streams different streams at the same time ( they can be up to 4 encrypted).. if only one hard drive I might get 2 or 3. but if I spread it around to several hard drives I can do 8 with little problems.. my board happens to support 10 harddrives 8 ide and 2 sata.. since gb-pvr is a little less configurable in this respect.. I probabley set up a few drives... one for the operating system, one for the swap, and a stipped raid for recording.. you should be able to record 5- 10 HDTV programs at the same time then if not encrypted. as a general rule it seems that one should be able to record 2-4 streams per drive. before it bottle necks to much

[bgowland]

how is the recording failing heavy pixeled ??? or just fails to start..

Now therein lies a story!

Sufficeit to say, two programmes back-to-back on the same channel...the first gets a mpg file created for it at the correct time but it remains at 0KB until the second recording starts...the second recording records perfectly for its full length...the first one records perfectly but only for the amount of time of the second's pre-padding and the first's post padding.

Anyway it gets more complicated than that when I do simultaneous DVB recordings or back-to-back where the two are on different channels. I've gone back to a single Nova for a while just to see if I can get that to record reliably (it seems to so far, but more tests are needed).

HD speed isn't a problem obviously as the failures happen with a single recording and I can solidly record simultaneous recordings on my PVR350 and both PVR500 tuners with little audible indication that the recording HD is doing much (its a 7200rpm, SATA-150 with 16MB cache).

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll keep plugging away at it.

Cheers,
Brian

[bgowland]

...if a locked driver you will have to make a special driver package by renaming the driver slightly and making a custum inf file( renaming it approriately and giving it a new name) then re-installing the driver again with this "new" driver for one of the cards...

Thinking about it further......I'll see how the single card tests go and if all looks OK then I might try your suggestion. I might get back to you on this.