[vdr] Re: ARM crashing again (don't buy rev 1.3, rev 1.5 for replay)

[Michal Dobrzynski <michal@appl.com.au>]

Thanks Gregor,

It's very disappointing though that when people ask about which card to  
buy they either get no response at all or are told that the 1.3 - 1.6  
cards are all essentially equal.

When I made the query late last year it concluded with my purchase of a  
rev1.5 card on the basis that it seemed to have the best features (ie  
low heat and low symbol rates). This card is identified as 1.3 by the  
drivers despite clearly being a 1.5 card. It also turns out that the  
stv0299 tuner used on the 1.5 isn't as good as the others after all in  
terms of signal strength management. Had I known I would have purchased  
a 1.6 card which would have cost me exactly the same amount.

Such is the life for users of Linux though, especially with hardware  
that's not in the mainstream. It's either a total lack of information  
about Linux support for hardware, or a lot of misinformation which  
leads to expensive regrets.

Regards,
Michal

On 28/02/2004, at 7:33 AM, Gregor Lawatscheck wrote:

> Jarkko Santala wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> > Sorry for reposting this here, but only after no useful replies from
> > linux-dvb. Is anyone on this list having this problem (see below)?  
> > I'll
> > start using the DVB-C-card for input too as of today, but I'm afraid  
> > the
> > problem might still appear and I'll probably keep using the DVB-T-card
> > too with an indoor antenna.
> > 	-jake
> I'm replying on the vdr list too because it's important for people  
> buying older cards for example from ebay:
> Rev 1.3 and rev 1.5 FF cards have a problem with replaying only  
> without a signal attached! Rev 1.6 and later are fine. I believe the  
> bug of this special case (backward compatibilty) is in the firmware  
> somewhere and was introduced between Dpram / Root  1.1.2.6 and 1.1.2.7  
> on 30 August 2002 and has something to do with the "internal buffer  
> handling". That's only my best guess as other driver / firmware  
> cominations seems to crash for different reasons, which doesn't  
> exactly make it easy to pin-point.
>
> The pre-newstruct driver 0.94 (works with vdr 1.1.13 which allows  
> DVB-T settings) is stable with rev 1.3. cards for example and that is  
> what I used for a long time before getting a rev 1.6 card. So there is  
> hope that this can be fixed, however it requires help from the  
> firmware wizards but they're busy people who could arguably say we  
> should get cards that work properly...
>
> > > > After browsing the mailing list archive I found this:
> > > >
> > > > http://www.linuxtv.org/mailinglists/linux-dvb/2003/05-2003/ 
> > > > msg00279.html
> It turned out there were two seperate problems with the firmware at  
> the time. The video buffer was too small to replay some streams (aka  
> RTL bug and BBC mux problem), the other was and is the ARM crash we're  
> talking about here. The patch bypassed the problem but became obsolete  
> around driver 1.0.0 when the video buffer was increased slightly.  
> Unfortunately it didn't solve the ARM crash problems and seems to be  
> unrelated.
>
> - Gregor
>
>
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