Hello,
My VDR system is having some annoying problems with EPG scanning. I'm not quite sure where to begin looking for solution so I thought to share my experiences with this list.
First, the system configuration. A regular Athlon64 PC running Ubuntu/ breezy (i386, not 64bit amd64). This is a one-card VDR box with a Technotrend DVB-C 2.1 FF card installed. I've tried with Ubuntu's 2.6.10 and 2.6.12 kernels and self-compiled 2.6.14rc2 (there was some DVB driver updates since 2.6.12 so I thought to try a later kernel too). dvb-ttpci firmware is 261f. VDR version is 1.3.33 with dvbplayer5 patch by Reinhard Nissl, and enAIO 2.6 and dvbsubtitles 0.3.8 patch compiled by Rolf Ahrenberg. These plugins are used: control, subtitles, osdteletext, xine, text2skin, lcdproc, femon. I'm using the Xine plugin with Xine player to display TV with a projector connected to computer's DVI port. The TV network is HTV in Helsinki, Finland. I've got an HTV Conax card connected to the DVB-C card. channels.conf contains about 135 TV, radio and data channels.
When the EPG scan kicks in, either automatically after the EPG scan timeout is reached or manually choosing scan in EPG setup or after issuing SCAN command via SVDRP connection, live TV picture goes off and vdr-xine displays a NO SIGNAL picture as expected. But sometimes, it looks like the scan never completes successfully. After about 2 hours since the "info: Starting EPG scan" message in syslog EPG bugfix statistics for various channels might appear to the syslog (but not always, I'm using the EPG bugfix level 3). But the channel that was on before starting the EPG scan is never switched back on. In fact, VDR is unable to display picture and sound on any channel anymore, not even after restarting VDR. You have to unload the dvb_ttpci driver with rmmod and modprobe it again and then it works again. Now the funny thing is that EPG scanning sometimes sort of works. It takes about 7 minutes to complete and then the last channel viewed is switched on again. However, many times after completing the scan, picture has all kinds of disorders so you really can't watch it and sound is awful snap, crackle & pop. Example can be seen in [1]. This is on all channels, all muxen. I sometimes get that also when normally changing channels, but that's pretty rare. Again, just restarting VDR doesn't fix these disorders, you have to reload the kernel driver in order to get working picture. The syslog is flooded with messages that can be seen in [2]. Femon reports very good signal quality all the time.
And then, sometimes the scan works just fine, the last channel is restored normally with a clear picture and sound after the scan completes. I've not been able to find any pattern between these three possible outcomes (all channels lost, bad picture while changing back to the last channel, works ok) of EPG scan. Except that automatic scan seems to always produce the all channels lost scenario, though it shouldn't make an sense (the actual scanning process, whether launched automatically or manually, is always the same, right?). But anyways, when you leave the VDR box on for the night and try to watch TV the next day, there's always the NO SIGNAL picture greeting you and no channels available until VDR is stopped, kernel driver reloaded and VDR started again. Any idea what might cause the bad picture after resuming from EPG scan (and occasionally, while normally changing channels)? And why tuning any channel after initiating an EPG scan sometimes doesn't work? Is anyone else using HTV (or other) network experiencing this?
[1] http://solitudo.net/vdr-bad-picture.jpg [2] http://solitudo.net/vdr-syslog.txt
Thanks,