(sorry for the dual post – but I accidentally hit send too soon)

I know I have asked this before, but I still have a problem which I don’t understand.

I have VDR 1.3.23 running with VDRAdmin-0.97-am3. I have a Linux 2.6.5 kernel and two DVB-T cards. The primary card is a Technotrends full function card, the second is a Nebula budget card. The normal configuration here would be for the primary card to do all the playback to the TV and the secondary card to do all the recording.

Sometime ago I have problems with skipping sync bytes when recording on the secondary card:  

May 22 01:39:05 vdr vdr[3451]: ERROR: skipped 15 bytes to sync on TS packet on device 2

May 22 01:39:05 vdr vdr[3451]: ERROR: skipped 102 bytes to sync on TS packet on device 2

May 22 01:39:05 vdr vdr[3451]: ERROR: skipped 71 bytes to sync on TS packet on device 2

May 22 01:39:11 vdr vdr[3451]: ERROR: skipped 116 bytes to sync on TS packet on device 2

May 22 01:39:11 vdr vdr[3451]: ERROR: skipped 72 bytes to sync on TS packet on device 2

May 22 01:39:44 vdr vdr[3451]: ERROR: skipped 112 bytes to sync on TS packet on device 2

May 22 01:39:44 vdr vdr[3451]: ERROR: skipped 76 bytes to sync on TS packet on device 2

This happened at the time when I was trying to get VDRConvert installed, and was therefore adding a lot of new libraries, updating libraries, etc. I also added a new 120GB disk as /video1. That meant remounting /video as /video1. I add this for completeness rather than because I think it’s a problem.

The effect of the skipping is that I get video breakup, sound goes all over the shoot and I get lots of nasty cracks on the sound. Very unpleasant. Sort of like watching circa 1962 black and white (sorry folks, yes I really am that old!).

To get over this, I removed the Nebula card and things got better. Of course, I can only watch TV from the same transponder as a recording is being broadcast from. A minor inconvenience most of the time. I change the config in VDRAdmin to use 1 card. All was well.

This week I reintroduced the Nebula card. All is well. No breaks in recording and the recordings look good. I then noticed that all though VDR can spot that there are two cards, VDRAdmin thinks there are only one. So, I reset VDRAdmin to use two cards. And BANG! My sync messages are back. As soon as a recording kicked in I got the messages as above.

I have just rebooted with the Nebula card disabled in the module start up, reset VDRAdmin to use one card, and started a recording. So far so good, no sync errors at all.

So:

Q1: Why do I get sync errors? Is this because the video signal is not too good? If that was the case I would expect to see errors on the TechnoTrends card, because when that gets bad signal the firmware crashes.

Q2: Could this be due to the new disk? Is this error because it can’t write to disk fast enough? I can’t believe that. It’s a brand new ATA disk, it on a different IDE channel to the primary disk, and nothing else is being used on that channel. There is a DVD drive there, but its unused. The whole of the disk is one partition given over to recordings so there should be no disk or ide contention.

Q3: I do all my programming via VDRAdmin. Does this specify which card to do a recording on? I can’t see that this is an option in the timers.conf file.

(Damn – just had a video stream broken message from the TT-FF card. So that not working now).

Is the best way out of this a total system rebuild? I can do that, it just takes time and the potential joy or retraining LIRC to recognise the remote!

HELP – Adrian