Hi there
I hope someone can give me some pointers or advise if I have a faulty card. For quite a while the card has been working fine. It is about 6 months old now.
I have been getting strong artefacts across all channels occasionally and the sound going poor (high-pitched beeps). I have an XBMC frontend and mythtv backend setup. Running mythtv 0.27 and xbmc-gotham-nightly. At first I thought the XBMC frontend could be the problem, but analysing the video taken from the capture card (by mythtv) shows that the video is being recorded with the artefacts on. I have set up some graphs to analyse the signal strength, SNR and BER (bit-error [ratio/rate]) and have attached the result.
My setup is a quad-core AMD 64-bit A10-5700 cpu (with radeon onboard (not used)). 16GB ram. Running ubuntu 13.10 with kernel Linux mythtv 3.11.0-12-generic #19-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 9 16:20:46 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux.
There is a A400P FXO card in for my asterisk server running the wctdm driver (in case that's relevant).
In the logs, the only relevant thing I can see is :-
Feb 2 11:55:10 mythtv kernel: [241474.683742] TurboSight TBS 6985 Frontend:
Feb 2 11:55:10 mythtv kernel: [241474.683742] tbs6985fe - Current Delivery System and Mode are unknown
Feb 2 12:06:01 mythtv kernel: [242126.023015] TurboSight TBS 6985 Frontend:
Feb 2 12:06:01 mythtv kernel: [242126.023015] tbs6985fe - Current Delivery System and Mode are unknown
Feb 2 12:09:01 mythtv CRON[964]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -x /usr/lib/php5/sessionclean ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && /usr/lib/php5/sessionclean /var/lib/php5 $(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime))
Feb 2 12:11:22 mythtv kernel: [242447.136406] TurboSight TBS 6985 Frontend:
Feb 2 12:11:22 mythtv kernel: [242447.136406] tbs6985fe - Current Delivery System and Mode are unknown
Feb 2 12:15:21 mythtv kernel: [242686.584100] TurboSight TBS 6985 Frontend:
Feb 2 12:15:21 mythtv kernel: [242686.584100] tbs6985fe - Current Delivery System and Mode are unknown
The Signal strength is pretty consistent ALL THE TIME at around 70%. The SNR can be fine for a while, but then goes quite erratic. And probably at the same time, the BER goes through the roof and I'm pretty sure this will equate to when the picture gets full with artefacts. Unwatchable.
I have checked the satellite feeds from the satellite and redone all the cabling and I'm quietly confident that that is not the issue as the Humax box records absolutely fine !
Pointers gratefully received. Or if TBS think it's a faulty card, could you let me know how I can get it replaced ?
I have checked the seating of the card and that it has power connected to it and it all looks good. The connections are good etc etc etc.....
Many Thanks.....
dp
PS - the BER graph was only just added, so the fact it shows 0 error is not to do with there being 0 error for quite a while, more the statistics were just added.