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Been playing around with the git vompserver for the last days (since it is needed to play with vompclient-raspi).
Since my "old" media-mvp dongles are incompatible with the latest git vompserver I has compiled new dongle using head of git as well.

What I do have problem with is that the UI freeze when one exits live tv almost 100% of the times. I must admit that this happens occasionally in my stable rig as well but much, much less frequent.

A bit troublesome is that if one kill all the vompclient processes it will cause a segfault on the vompserver side as well when there has been a freeze.

Attached are two log files. One from the vompclient and then one of the crash of the vompserver.
From the vompclient-freeze log file the first exit was fine but the second failed. The exits where initiated by pressing the stop button (Button 54).

The problem appears to be that the makedevenv script does not unpack the content of mvpdevfs-4.tar.gz correctly to the dongle/tofs directory. The /proc directory is empty so its probably disregarded by the file copy or unpack command.

My temporary workaround is to simply create the proc directory manually in the tofs folder and rebuilding the dongle. This will make a dongle that boots correctly.

Dongle compiled for the mvp on a fresh installed debian squeeze 32 bit host. Booting the mvp succeeds but once the dongle is loaded there is only a black screen.

The makedevenv scripts used are the latest from git as of yesterday.

Telneting to the mvp reveals that there is no /proc on the filesystem. All other parts appear to be there.

Of course start vompclient will thus fail:

~ # ./vompclient -d
00:17:09.726094 [info]   32 Core - Starting up...
00:17:09.726856 [info]   32 Core - Signal handlers set up successfully
00:17:09.727179 [info]   32 Core - Remote module initialised
00:17:09.727415 [info]   32 Core - LED module initialised
00:17:09.727717 [debug]  32 MTD - Could not open /proc/mtd
00:17:09.727944 [EMERG]  32 Core - Mtd module failed to initialise
00:17:09.728202 [notice] 32 Core - BoxStack module shut down
00:17:09.728465 [notice] 32 Core - Command module shut down
00:17:09.728723 [notice] 32 Core - VDR module shut down
00:17:09.728951 [notice] 32 Core - OSD module shut down
00:17:09.729173 [notice] 32 Core - Audio module shut down
00:17:09.729396 [notice] 32 Core - Video module shut down
00:17:09.729621 [notice] 32 Core - Timers module shut down
00:17:09.729843 [notice] 32 Core - MTD module shut down
00:17:09.730106 [notice] 32 Core - LED module shut down
00:17:09.730368 [notice] 32 Core - Remote module shut down
00:17:09.730597 [notice] 32 Core - WOL module shut down
00:17:09.730841 [notice] 32 Core - Sleeptimer module shut down
00:17:09.731055 [notice] 32 Core - Log module shutting down... bye!

Any clues on what is missing? I tried cross compiling on a debian squeeze 64 bit host first with the same results. Unfortunately my old build environment is gone and I haven't compiled any dongles since late 2006 so I'm a bit rusty in the art of cross compiling.

I can confirm that the problems described are resolve when the latest vompserver in the git repository is used.

Thanks for the link to the hauppauge mvp dongle. It will come in handy since my current dongle is incompatible with the new vompserver.

I'm currently running vompserver 0.3.1 on my backend gentoo server. vdr version is 1.7.25.

On the latest sources, 2012-09-14,  I have commented out the line
setCharset(Osd::getInstance()->charSet());
in vdr.cc to get around the issue of vompclient starting successfully.

I am facing some issues that one wonder is due to not using the current vompserver in git.

Playback of recordings:
* vompclient hangs and get unresponsive if fast forward/rewind is pressed. vompclient have to be killed.

Live tv:
* Only one channel is shown. There are numerous other channels available that are shown on my hauppauge mediamvp clients. The channel shown is the first one in the list.
* Playback of the live tv channel does not give any picture nor sound. The UI is responsive and one can get back to the main menu.

Could the issues above be due to the vompserver version?

I will work on updating the gentoo ebuild to fetch the latest git version but it was a while since I wrote any ebuilds so its not yet functional. Would appreciate if anyone on this list has an ebuild to share!

- Magnus

This sounds extremely interesting... and hopefully we will have a nice replacement to the mvp's.

The last couple of years I have played around with htpc's as vdr frontends. Sadly enough the solutions have not turned out to be enough WAF nor have as good picture quality as the four mvp's in our household deliver.

A few posts above you refer to the Android NDK. Is the solution developed dependant on the NDK or is it sufficient to build the android Vomp using the Android SDK?

A box that looks promising is the Dvico Tvix XRoid A1. Its equipped with a Sigma Design SMP8657 SoC. Its a bit expensive but appears to have good performance. Some complaints about stability and missing features in the firmware/s but it is slowly improving with every firmware released.

Did some more testing tonight and I am now able to confirm that it works on some channel broadcasts!

I'm located in Sweden receiving dvb-t broadcasted by terracom (and supplied by Boxer).

Chanels with teletext displaying correctly
TV3, TV4, TV5, TV6, TV4+, TV400, Kanal 9

No intial page nor header displayed but able to back out - Perhaps no teletext is transmitted?
MTV, ZTV, Discovery, TV4 Fakta, TV4 Sport, Animal Planet, VH-1, CNN, Canal 7, Axess TV, Comedy Central

Header displayed but page 100 never found. Able to back out
TV4 Film, Silver

Initial page displayed but not able to switch page nor back out. (restart of vompclient needed)
SVT1, SVT2, SVT24, Barn/Kunskapsk.

To slugish to be usable
TCM

No tranmition at the time for the test
Nickelodeon

Out of the tested broadcasts the teletext for channels TV4, TV4+ and TV400 where the most responsive.

I just tested with lates cvs (both vompserver and vompclient) as of 2009-07-19 (19.00 GMT+1) and the behavior is still as explained by AndersF.

It appears however that its more performant now than previously. Now its simply a matter of a few seconds before the first teletext page is shown. This took quite a while before.

Once the page is shown there is no response on any button presses. The live tv is displayed correctly in the background.

- Magnus

Our family's wishlist,

Timeshift
Possible to delete ongoing recordings
Possible to add series recording

- Magnus

Works great so far.
Both dongle and plugin compiled flawlessly. Had some problems though getting the dongle to be downloaded to the client until I realized the new vompserver plugins directory. Moved my existing vomp.conf file to the vompserver plugins directory and the dongle was downloaded just fine.

The new builds will be put under more stress tomorrow when the rest of the family begins watching tv on their boxes...

- Magnus

Works fine for me so far...

- Magnus

vdr 1.4.5-2
H3 hardware

Script runs fine on my gentoo development box wich is fairly up to date. Good work!!!

- Magnus

Hi,

Something fishy here. The mvpmc-dongle DOES NOT require any GUI server to boot. You wrote that you tried with a "selfmade dongle". Why not try with one of the official ones. I have myself used the mvpmc 0.3.1 dongle while troubleshooting some problems and knows for sure that it boots correctly on my H3. Once booted it should be possible to telnet to the box!

Are you sure that you have unplugged the powercoord for at least two minutes before making a boot attempt? ( I recall I mentioned this in a personal message to you a while ago) If I don't do this, my unit won't boot correctly either and experience sort of what you do i.e. a halt in the boot process after three blue bars and rarely also a reboot before it halts.

- Magnus

Hi,

My patches attempted to minimize the changes to the existing vomp development structure. I belive this is a good path since the vomp development guide is actually quite trivial to follow...

Download crosstool-0.43
Unpack it into vomp/crosstool directory.
Create a file mvp-ppc405.sh into the croostool-0.43 directory. File is attached to this message post
Build the crosstool toolchain. ./mvp-ppc405.sh

Note that this will build a toolchain with gcc-3.4.5-glibc-2.2.5. Easy to change the mvp-ppc405.sh script to use a newer glibc! How one adapt the crosstool build to use uclib is beyond my knowledge!

My dongle build with the above toolchain works beautifully except for the reboot thingy wich really of minor importance. Are you sure you rebuiild all components using the correct toolchain?

I'm attaching the modified mvpmc kernel script I used to build the 2.4.31 kernel as well as the .config file for the kernel. The scripts shows wich patches I applied.

- Magnus

Hi,

You guys talk about the Hauppage toolchain. It wouldn't by any chance be buildroot - http://buildroot.uclibc.org/ that will be used?

Since crosstool-0.43 gcc-3.4.5-glibc-2.2.5 didn't solve my particular issue I'm willing to give something else a shot.

- Magnus