Saturday, October 10, 2009

Fix a Happauge Wintv-PVR-150 which do not initialise correctely on linux


Maybe you have a Wintv-PVR-150 card on your Linux box, and you regularly encounter some "initialization" problems, even if the card is correctly recognized by linux.
Symptoms may be:
  • no mpeg2 output (empty video file in mythtv)
  • only snow (channel can't be selected?)
  • black picture
  • picture stretched or distorted
  • black and white image
To fix this problem there are two things you can do:
  1. Move your card on another PCI slot and see if things improve
  2. Change your motherboard
For sure changing the motherboard is not something we want to do, but sometime,  you have no choice.

I had this problem, and if changing the PCI slot reduced the ratio of bad initialization, it didn't fixed it completely. After my system died, I changed the motherboard and CPU, and now everything works perfectely.

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