Common error messages

1. Errors about RTC, the Linux real time clock device
2. Video card memory errors

Capture card problems

1. Channels black-and-white and numbers off-by-one
2. Too few buffers with bttv before kernel 2.4.21
3. bttv takes a long time to load
4. Audio problems with Prolink PixelView cards
5. Poor performance with the rivatv driver
6. Unable to tune to channels using the bttv, saa7134 or cx88 drivers

Video card problems

1. tvtime not starting when using the Radeon FireGL drivers
2. Corrupted YUY2 video with EPIA onboard video
3. Terrible XVIDEO performance with Radeon cards and XFree86 4.3
4. Poor performance with SiS driver in XFree86 4.2.1 and earlier
5. XVIDEO always-on-top with some Radeon cards
6. Corrupted image borders on NVIDIA cards in overscan modes
7. No XVIDEO support on pre-GeForce NVIDIA cards with the "nv" driver
8. Problems with NVIDIA TNT and TNT2 cards
9. XVIDEO initialization problem with the savage driver

Driver conflicts

1. Using overlay mode in xawtv or zapping causes system instabilities
2. apm driver known to cause frame drops
3. ntfs driver known to cause frame drops

Common error messages

1. Errors about RTC, the Linux real time clock device

Enhanced Real Time Clock support in your kernel can help applications like tvtime improve the smoothness of their output. The kernel module that provides this feature is called rtc, and it is compiled and installed by default on most Linux distributions.

This feature will improve the quality of tvtime's output, but is NOT required for tvtime to operate.

Reasons why tvtime might not be able to use /dev/rtc include:

1. Your user does not have read/write access to the device file /dev/rtc.
2. You compiled your own kernel and forgot to enable the RTC device.
3. Your user does not have the rights to get high resolution timers.

If your user does not have sufficient priviledge, the RTC device cannot be used for high-resolution timers. To solve this, you can do one of the following:

1. Run tvtime as root.
2. Set the tvtime executable SUID root using this command:
   chmod u+s /usr/bin/tvtime.
3. Allow user processes the ability to use high resolution timers by running this command as root every time your machine boots:
   sysctl -w dev.rtc.max-user-freq=1024

2. Video card memory errors

tvtime uses the XVIDEO extension, which allocates video card memory. We have experienced some problems where the X server fails to provide enough video card memory for tvtime to use it. This can happen if your video card is old and simply doesn't have enough memory to hold the framebuffer and tvtime at once. However, there are also bugs in X servers and X drivers that can cause this.

If your distribution is using the Xorg X server and you are seeing these errors, please comment on Xorg bug 474.

Capture card problems

1. Channels black-and-white and numbers off-by-one

The tuner driver defaults to detecting a PAL tuner on many NTSC capture cards, a notable example being the ATI TV Wonder cards. This causes all of the cable frequencies to be out of alignment, channel numbers are off-by-one and slightly detuned. To fix this, the tuner type must be told explicitly when loading your capture driver. For example, with the bttv driver use the following:

    modprobe bttv tuner=2

You may have to first remove the bttv module if it is already loaded. To make this change automatic, in your /etc/modules.conf file, add the following line:

    options bttv tuner=2

This will ensure that whenever the tuner module is loaded, it will use the correct tuner for this card. If this does not fix the problem please post a bug report on the tvtime bugs page.

In older versions of bttv, this module option could also be passed to the tuner module. This method is deprecated in newer 2.6 kernels, and so you must pass the parameter to the capture driver itself.

To attack this problem, we believe that the tuner module must be fixed to correctly detect the difference in tuner, as so many users are affected by this problem. To help with this, please follow up on tvtime bug 711428.

2. Too few buffers with bttv before kernel 2.4.21

The popular bttv capture driver only provided applications with two buffers by default in versions shipped with kernels before 2.4.21. Our advanced deinterlacing algorithms require a longer history of past input frames in order to predict motion in the video stream.

To give applications more buffers, use this option when loading the bttv driver:

    modprobe bttv gbuffers=4

To make this change automatic, add the following in your /etc/modules.conf file:

    options bttv gbuffers=4

3. bttv takes a long time to load

On some cards without a tuner, bttv can take a long time to load (a few minutes). If you see this problem, try using this option in your modules.conf file for loading the i2c-algo-bit module:

    options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1

If that does not help, please post a bug report.

4. Audio problems with Prolink PixelView cards

The bttv driver seems to misdetect Prolink Pixelview cards pretty badly. There are five Prolink cards listed in CARDLIST for the bttv driver:

  card=16 - Prolink Pixelview PlayTV (bt878)
  card=37 - Prolink PixelView PlayTV pro
  card=50 - Prolink PV-BT878P+4E /
            PixelView PlayTV PAK /
            Lenco MXTV-9578 CP
  card=70 - Prolink Pixelview PV-BT878P+ (Rev.4C)
  card=72 - Prolink Pixelview PV-BT878P+9B
            (PlayTV Pro rev.9B FM+NICAM)

The bttv driver cannot seem to autodetect these cards correctly. We have found that cards which should use card=70 but are instead loaded using card=72 are causing audio mute/unmute to fail randomly, or even be inverted, resulting in no audio or just snippets of audio. To avoid this, please make sure you are using the correct variant of this card. Specifically, the rev 9D of the newer Pixelview cards should use card=70 and not card=72.

5. Poor performance with the rivatv capture driver

By default, the rivatv the driver copies frames from video memory into system memory, which can harm performance. Performance can be improved by using DMA to transfer the frames, however, this option only works when using the open-source "nv" driver in X, not with the NVIDIA binary drivers.

You can turn on dma support as follows in your modules.conf file:

    options rivatv dma=1

6. Unable to tune to channels using the bttv, saa7134 or cx88 drivers

The bttv, saa7134, and cx88 drivers each support a wide variety of cards which all use the same chip. In particular, these cards differ in what tuner they use, how many inputs they have, and how it is configured.

Often, these drivers cannot autodetect the card type, or detect the incorrect card. To debug this, you must watch your kernels logs by running the "dmesg" command, potentially loading and unloading the driver with different options until the driver is successfully loaded.

Some hints:

1. If your card appears as UNKNOWN/GENERIC, then the tuner driver will not be loaded and the card will likely not work. You will need to load the driver with the correct card number.
2. If your tuner reports that it is using type -1, it is not loaded and you will not be able to tune any stations.
3. If you are an NTSC user, make sure the tuner you are using announces itself as an NTSC tuner.

For example, if you are using the bttv driver, the common procedure for setting up a card is as follows:

1. Run "modprobe bttv" with no options.
2. Run "dmesg". Check to see if your card is autodetected, and if the tuner is correct. If everything looks fine, you're done.
3. If the card appears as UNKNOWN/GENERIC, find the CARDLIST file in your kernel documentation and find your card in the list.
4. Unload bttv and tuner using "rmmod bttv" and "rmmod tuner".
5. Run "modprobe bttv card=X" where X is the number of your card.
6. Run "dmesg" again. See if the card loaded properly and if the tuner is correct.
7. If not, unload bttv and tuner again, and try specifying the tuner type as well using "modprobe bttv card=X tuner=Y".
8. Curse Linux for being so complicated.

Video card problems

1. tvtime not starting when using the Radeon FireGL drivers

With the Radeon FireGL drivers, the user has the option of having OpenGL use an overlay surface, giving 3D graphics without tearing, or video overlay surfaces for multimedia players. This can be set in the Device section for the fglrx of your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 using:

    Option  "VideoOverlay"       

or

    Option  "OpenGLOverlay"      

To use tvtime, you MUST select VideoOverlay instead of OpenGLOverlay. The tvtime bug report on this is bug 787142.

2. Corrupted YUY2 video with EPIA onboard video

We have received multiple reports that the binary XFree86 drivers from VIA for the EPIA onboard video have corrupted YUY2 overlay surfaces, and have problems with high framerate video. We have also heard that these problems do not exist in the open source driver in XFree86 CVS. More information on either driver and their status with tvtime would be appreciated.

3. Terrible XVIDEO performance with Radeon cards and XFree86 4.3

We have had numerous reports of horrible performance from Radeon cards and XFree86 4.3. So far, nobody has been able to figure out conclusively what is going on here. See the madness in XFree86 bug 414. The tvtime bug about this is bug 759804.

4. Poor performance with SiS driver in X 4.2.1 and earlier

The XVideo drivers in XFree86 versions up to 4.2.1 exhibit extremely poor performance. This is fixed in later versions of the driver. If you own a SiS card, please upgrade to the latest driver by Thomas Winischhofer, or upgrade to X 4.3 which includes a recent version of his driver. The web page for the SiS driver is at http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsis630.shtml.

The tvtime bug report to on this is bug 636338.

5. XVideo always-on-top with some Radeon cards

Around the end of 2002, it was noted that with the ATI Radeon 7000 card and the XFree86 4.2.1 packages in debian, XVideo windows are "always on top" and cannot be minimized. This was also seen in RH8.0's XFree86 4.2 with a Radeon 32MB DDR, R100 QD (a 7200 card?). We have not researched this issue enough to know the extent of what cards are affected, or what versions will fix this. More information on this would be appreciated.

6. Corrupted image borders on NVIDIA cards in overscan modes

There is a bug in versions of the NVIDIA driver before 1.0-4349 and the nv driver in 4.3.0 and earlier for cards which support wide filter kernels for high quality XVideo surfaces. If the overscan value is larger than 0, then the card uses memory outside of the image for interpolating around the edges, causing corruption all around the outside of the tvtime window.

NVIDIA was made aware of the problem and fixed it for driver release 1.0-4349 and in the nv driver in CVS XFree86. For reference, the tvtime bug on this was bug 694144.

7. No XVIDEO support on pre-GeForce NVIDIA cards with the "nv" driver

The open source NVIDIA driver for X ("nv" not "nvidia") does not support XVideo surfaces for pre-GeForce cards like the TNT2. To use tvtime with these cards, you must use the binary drivers.

The binary drivers give better performance for XVIDEO than the open-source driver, since it can use the kernel module component to negotiate DMA transfers for video frames. Where possible, stick to the binary drivers when using tvtime on NVIDIA hardware.

8. Problems with NVIDIA TNT and TNT2 cards

Corrupted frames

The TNT and TNT2 cards are very limited in their bandwidth, and this problem will appear as horizontal lines in the video output unless the monitor is at a low resolution. Smaller output window sizes will make the problem worse, as the DAC will have to read out more data in the same amount of time. This problem should not occur with any of the GeForce series cards.

Card cannot downscale

A user of a NV5: RIVA TNT2 Ultra (rev 11) noted that the card cannot downscale video, it only crops it. This is apparently a hardware deficiency of many TNT cards, and the XVIDEO API provides no way to detect this case.

Poor performance at high resolution and refresh rate

A user of a TNT2 Vanta card reported that blit performance was absolutely terrible until they went down to a resolution of 800x600, at which point speed quadrupled. We believe this is due to bandwidth problems on these cards.

9. XVideo initialization problem with the savage driver

We've investigated a bug where the savage X driver does not initialize its XVideo subsystem unless it starts on a modeline where the resolution equals the virtual resolution. That is, if you have a virtual resolution of 1600x1200, make sure you start on a 1600x1200 mode, otherwise XVideo won't initialize.

This bug was noted on the XFree86 devel list.

Driver conflicts

1. Using overlay mode in xawtv or zapping causes system instabilities

Overlay mode, as can be used in xawtv or zapping, causes system instabilities. This is because their 'overlay' mode allows the capture card to write directly to video memory without locking it first, which is unsafe for many video cards, specifically those which do not use a linear framebuffer (such as NVIDIA cards with the binary drivers).

Use of the xawtv/overlay mode has caused system crashes, and specifically, can cause tvtime to crash if it tries to use XVideo features after the framebuffer area has been destroyed by the capture card (see tvtime bug 702539).

A workaround for having a no-CPU-access mode is to use the XFree86 "v4l" extension, which allows safe use of the framebuffer by capture cards. tvtime does not support using this mode, nor do we plan to, as we would not be able to composite our OSD on top of the video signal or perform any processing of the video.

2. apm driver known to cause frame drops

We had a problem report that in RH9 (later 2.4 kernel), the GNOME battery applet was polling apm every few seconds. This caused the system to block for 50-100ms causing stutters in video playback.

3. ntfs driver known to cause frame drops

We had a problem report that having gkrellm running would cause frame drops in tvtime. We believe this was due to the ntfs driver, as the frame drops occurred whenever gkrellm was monitoring the users' other disk that had ntfs partitions. See tvtime bug 634674.