DVB on the Mac — Forums

[muzzz]

Ok, after a night's rest, I removed the PCI card, noted the number on the 2nd largest chip which was:

TDA10045H
ZYA032R.ZI 03
tS03113

When I replaced the card, booted the computer, then booted iTele, it read 'initialising tune...' and then the main windows came up. Now, i know the card was placed correctly into it's PCI bay otherwise when I initially booted iTele, it would've shown a 'no multi-media devices found' message. Maybe it's just one of those things.

Anyway, now iTele isn't tuning into any stations when the card is selected from the Inputs menu. I know my antenna port is working and the cable is as well, any ideas.

Thanks for all your help.

[FyKnight]

OK well that chip is deifnitely supported. You do not have a new model of card. It most likely was some intermittent seating problem or there was a short on the board or some such.

First, please just confirm that you clicked 'scan' and then waited for about 5 minutes as the greyed-out channels slowly disappeared as iTele checked each one and found nothing. Oh, and by the way, what location did you select from the scan sheet? Where are you and on what transmitter?

Assuming you did a real scan, try following the these instructions to run tunetest on your Mac so you can carefully look for a frequency.

At this stage it definitely appears to be a reception problem (unless you just have a dud board). Either way, following the tunetest steps will discover it.

[muzzz]

Alright.
I've run tunetest successfully on Channel 9 (191.625MHz) and output the data to the test.ts file, but when VLC tries to play it, the application crashes. I can supply you with the crash.log of VLC if that might help determine why.

I sourced my frequencies from:
http://www.dtvforum.info/index.php?showtopic=52
which lists channel frequencies from Brisbane, Sydney, Wollongong and the Illawarra.

I'm in Sydney, Australia, which was the option (Australia) that I chose from the dropdown menu when prompted for the scan. Firstly, I went to the Inputs menu, selected (highlighted) my card from the menu, clicked 'scan' in the menu which appeared underneath the card selection, selected 'Australia' as the region, then away it went, scanning through the frequencies. All the greyed out numbers in the Channels list disappear once the tuning has finished, but are not replaced with any channel listings.

As I've run the tunetest in the Terminal with channel 9, at full 0xFFFFFFFF progress, I'm not sure why when I try to tune iTele, it at least doesn't pick up channel 9. The only thing I can think of is that the bandwidth might default to 8MHz (as it says when tunetest boots up), as I have to change it using "bandwith 7". That's all I can think as to why I'm not picking up any channels.

My aerial is plugged in correctly at both ends. I'm in the inner-west of the Sydney metro area, so I *should* be able to pick up some generic digital signal. When you asked for the transmitter information, I'm a bit unsure of what you meant by that.

If you need any code-listings from the Terminal /Console, just let me know.

Thanks.

[FyKnight]

OK, so you get a lock, it saves a file out OK, but VLC crashes. That is definitely an indication of reception problems - the stream must be such poor quality that it can't get to the first frame before crashing. This is most likely why iTele does not find anything there too - it waits to get some info from the stream rather than just looking at the progress level.

The VLC crash log wouldn't help me much (assuming you can play back other stuff with VLC). dtvforum is a fine source for freq info altho http://www.dba.org.au is better. You did all the right things to scan, good. The information to use a bandwidth of 7MHz is contained in the channels list for Australia, so iTele is certainly using that.

[muzzz]

Ahhh! An inner west resident like myself! It is a small world sometimes, eh?

I bought an aerial (rabbit ears) with an amplifier inbuilt to see if that might make a difference, and lo-and-behold, it did. I had suspected it might be our aerial. Whilst we have a fairly large (therefore fairly good??) aerial on our roof top, it's shared with our neighbours nextdoor, and split again approx 4 times throughout our house, so by the time it gets to my room, it's too weak.

Anyway... I tuned it in, got very excited that I could spend even more time on my mac watching TV. Channel 7 is the hardest to pick up, I find. Do you know of any issues with using an amplified antenna to boost the signal and the DTV card? I've made sure I don't crank the dial up all the way, just to be sure...

A couple of concerns with using the program.
When I was watching the ABC (regular digital channel) for a bit, it crashed my computer, which, from my experience, is relatively very rare (to OS9 for example). The digital signal would break up slightly, then all the windows darken slightly, the message "you need to restart your computer now - hold down the power button.. etc". Is there any log that might let me know why this is happening? Maybe I a) don't have enough HD space to cope with it or perhaps my RAM/CPU isn't up to speed.
I've 768MB of RAM, and a DP 1.25GHz processor.

Also, I've been trying to use MPlayer as the window for watching DTV in, but I can only seem to get the internal one happening. I'm sure there's an easy way which I've overlooked regarding how to allocate the window playback.

Thanks again for your help, fellow Sydney-sider!

[FyKnight]

Hopefully the amplifier setting would not make any difference. Often amplifiers just amplify the noise as well as the signal, so unless it is below the AGC range of the tuner, it doesn't do very much except add a little more noise of its own. Of course sometimes it does help 'tho

For me Channel 7 is one of the best. SBS used to be my worst but it's been really good lately and now I'd say that Channel 10 is at the bottom. This is all in terms of walking right in front of the aerial - normally I get them all at 100% (after hardware error correction).

It's very weird that you got a kernel panic! Usually iTele just crashes normally itself. It is possible I think when it tries to overread a buffer (although it really shouldn't be!) to get a panic but I haven't seen one in ages. The log is found in /Library/Logs/panic.log. Please post it here. Have you managed to make it happen again? You have the same Mac as me too just with more RAM. HD space would not be an issue for just watching.

If the internal player works then most people prefer that to MPlayer. But the problem is probably that you are using a beta that's too new. Go and get MPlayer OS X 2 beta 4 - that one works with iTele. Not quite sure what you mean re: 'allocating' the window playback.

[muzzz]

Firstly, my apologies for the delay in replying to your message. Have been a little bit busy this past week (end?) or so.

The panic.log is as follows:

*********

Wed May 19 17:28:51 2004


panic(cpu 1): pmap_unnest: Other processor (0) did not see interruption request

Latest stack backtrace for cpu 1:
Backtrace:
0x000857F4 0x00085C24 0x000287B4 0x000881FC 0x000663B0 0x000666C4 0x00038EA8 0x00206F2C
0x001DB75C 0x0020FF5C 0x00092950 0x00000000
backtrace terminated - frame not mapped or invalid: 0xF21C1880

Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x2277B500)
PC=0x8FE19090; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x00003008; DSISR=0x40000000; LR=0x00000000; R1=0x00000000; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.7:
Wed Aug 13 20:21:32 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.47.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC



*********

Mon Oct 11 21:37:01 2004


panic(cpu 0): transfer on list but not in GART
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x000857F4 0x00085C24 0x000287B4 0x16FF6CEC 0x16FF6E9C 0x0022FFFC 0x0022EEB8 0x0022EE24
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.ATIRadeon8500(2.2.6)@0x16ff2000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(1.2.7)@0x1978e000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.2.7)@0x172f2000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(1.3)@0x1707b000
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x1730E280)
PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x00000000; DSISR=0x00000000; LR=0x00000000; R1=0x00000000; XCP=0x00000000 (Unknown)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.8:
Wed Sep 10 15:20:55 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.49.obj~2/RELEASE_PPC


*********

(the end)

I always have the console window open when I boot/run iTele now, just to see what it's doing, and I find it tends to display messages as such:

00 motion_type at 20 7
ac-tex damaged at 20 35
ac-tex damaged at 26 3
00 motion_type at 22 4
00 motion_type at 14 24
ac-tex damaged at 38 8
00 motion_type at 12 9
00 motion_type at 22 34
MPEG motion vector out of boundary
MPEG motion vector out of boundary
MPEG motion vector out of boundary
end mismatch left=381
MPEG motion vector out of boundary
MPEG motion vector out of boundary
MPEG motion vector out of boundary
00 motion_type at 12 5
MPEG motion vector out of boundary
invalid mb type in B Frame at 13 6
audioAheadBy 305756 us (apts 40746685133 vpts 40746379377)
Audio ahead of video sync: adding silence
Weird pts - resetting
ChannelData: checking sockets since SIGPIPE received
Stopping decoder thread...

or

ERROR: Table 0x42 length 192 overruns restart point 183
Found new SDT. Transport stream id is 545

PacketProcessor: Packet has zero or negative payload -24!
PacketProcessor: Packet has zero or negative payload -47!
Adding silence due to buffer underflow
PacketProcessor: Packet has zero or negative payload -63!

. . . . . . . . . . .

anyway, these are a few of the things the console spits out. thought you might be able to make more sense of them than i.

thanks muchly for your help!

[FyKnight]

That console output is due to errors in the stream. If you improve your reception they'll go away

The panic log is a bit of a worry ... somehow iTele managed to get the Radeon video card driver to crash!

Hmmm, I wonder what 'transfer on list but not in GART' means... I know what the GART is but I've no idea what list it's talking about. Some DMA queue I guess. Couldn't easily find the error in the Darwin src either. I take it you haven't had any further kernel panics? I might ask about this on a driver developer list...