Re: cx5000 default auto sleep mode

["Timothy D. Lenz" <tlenz@vorgon.com>]

Update, that card has now died. We bought 2 of those cards at the same 
time and the other has been working for a about 3 weeks with sleep mode 
disabled. I tried it with sleep mode enabled and ether vdr or xine 
crashed with in a few hours. But the version of xine I am still running 
on that computer is touchy about corrupt video streams and will crash 
when video starts pixeling or drops out totally for extended time. When 
I get a chance to update xine, I'll try turning auto sleep mode back on.

I have sent a message to Dvico, but I don't expect much since I've now 
had the card for more then a year. I should have just tried the other 
card way back then, but I thought sure it was a software/driver problem 
since making changes did at times effect how long it worked.

On 4/14/2010 9:39 PM, Devin Heitmueller wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:44 PM, Andy Walls<awalls@md.metrocast.net>  wrote:
>> On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 13:40 -0400, Devin Heitmueller wrote:
>>> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Timothy D. Lenz<tlenz@vorgon.com>  wrote:
>>>> Thanks to Andy Walls, found out why I kept loosing 1 tuner on a FusionHD7
>>>> Dual express. Didn't know linux supported an auto sleep mode on the tuner
>>>> chips and that it defaulted to on. Seems like it would be better to default
>>>> to off.
>>>
>>> Regarding the general assertion that the power management should be
>>> disabled by default, I disagree.  The power savings is considerable,
>>> the time to bring the tuner out of sleep is negligible, and it's
>>> generally good policy.
>>>
>>> Andy, do you have any actual details regarding the nature of the problem?
>>
>> Not really.  DViCo Fusion dual digital tv card.  One side of the card
>> would yield "black video screen" when starting a digital capture
>> sometime after (?) the VDR ATSC EPG plugin tried to suck off data.  I'm
>> not sure there was a causal relationship.
>>
>> I hypothesized that one side of the dual-tuner was going stupid or one
>> of the two channels used in the cx23885 was getting confused.  I was
>> looking at how to narrow the problem down to cx23885 chip or xc5000
>> tuner, or s5h14xx demod when I noted the power managment module option
>> for the xc5000.  I suggested Tim try it.
>>
>> It was dumb luck that my guess actually made his symptoms go away.
>>
>> That's all I know.
>
> We did have a similar issue with the PCTV 800i.  Basically, the GPIO
> definition was improperly defined for the xc5000 reset callback.  As a
> result, it was strobing the reset on both the xc5000 *and* the
> s5h1411, which would then cause the s5h1411's hardware state to not
> match the driver state.
>
> After multiple round trips with the hardware engineer at PCTV, I
> finally concluded that there actually wasn't a way to strobe the reset
> without screwing up the demodulator, which prompted me to disable the
> xc5000 reset callback (see cx88-cards:2944).
>
> My guess is that the reset GPIO definition for that board is wrong (a
> problem exposed by this change), or that it's resetting the s5h1411 as
> well.
>
> Devin
>