[mythtvnz] HVR-2200 Not finding channels...

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:09:23 +1300, you wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>Thanks for the reponses last night, I have made some progress. I found 
>that I was still missing firmware for one of the chips on the HVR-2200 
>when I tried the 'scan' utility. Adding that firmware allows me to pick 
>up some channels, although what channels are picked up seems to vary 
>from scan to scan! I am able to pick up the TVNZ channels reliably.

That could be a bad aerial.  The higher frequency multiplexes are
generally harder to receive, and TVNZ is normally the lowest
frequency, so it often is the only one that works on rabbits ears or
with bad signal.

>My next problem is that when trying to watch TV I get less than a 
>second of video before the picture freezes. After about a minute the 
>frontend then falls back to the menu with the message "Video frame 
>buffering failed too many times". There doesn't appear to be anything in 
>the logs, but the stdout of mythfrontend shows that it is waiting for 
>files which aren't there, e.g. /mnt/recordings/livetv/1001_<some 
>timestamp>.mpg - there are several of these entries.
>
>Looking in /mnt/recordings/livetv:
>
>[robert at laforge ~]$ ls -la /mnt/recordings/livetv/
>total 8
>drwxr-xr-x 2 mythtv root  4096 Oct 19 20:02 .
>drwxr-xr-x 5 mythtv root  4096 Oct 19 19:51 ..
>-rw-r--r-- 1 mythtv users    0 Oct 19 18:36 1010_20111019183639.mpg
>
>Shows only one file!
>
>Anyone got any idea why the other files are not getting written?
>
>Cheers,
>
>Rob

Getting picture and then having it stop is also typical of a bad
signal level on the aerial.  LiveTV recordings are also expired very
rapidly.  There may be some settings to control that somewhere, but I
would expect them to disappear in a couple of minutes.  But getting
errors about missing files is usually due to the tuner never having
locked in and started recording to the missing file.

If your TV is near your backend, try plugging the HVR-2200 aerial
cable into the TV to see if the signal is good.