[AG-TECH] Wierd problems with video using VIC in fedora 3/4

[Proshanta Saha]

Hi,

I've been debugging a non-responsive vic window problem for days, what 
happens is that for the first 5 mins, I get perfect motion on all 3 cameras. 
All of a sudden one of them will freeze up. Stoping the session and staring 
it again causes vic to show a green window, and essentially render that 
capture card useless. Still works under tvtime, just not with vic. I am 
almost hitting a brick wall, ie. tried almost everything I could to find out 
if it was my server(dual core dell 380s), capture card (Hauppauge Winttv 401 
c88xx version), linux (fedora 4), or the vic software. 

Step 1: was making sure that the Wintv cards were all good, and had not 
problem running simultaneously for hrs, a fair amount of burn in tests were 
done, the tv cards all seem to be able to run at capture mode for hrs with 
no problem. 

Step 2: was to see if vic was kind of not so nvidia friendly, the video 
capture server has a dual head 128mb PCI-E, which I've heard people find not 
so great to work with under linux. I personally did not find any such 
problems, running at 1600x1200 just fine, perfect response time and etc. But 
just for kicks I brought out a dual xeon dell box I had lying around, with 
more than ample horse power with a pretty simple video card, probably an 
intel i810 type of a card. Unfortunatley I faced the same problem.

Step 3: Fedora 4 versus Fedora 3. So I decided to try Fedora 3 with some 
spare hard disks. Fedora 3 seems surprisingly easy to setup AG with, unlike 
the mountain I had to climb for Fedora 4. However, it seems to also 
mysteriously freeze one of the vic screens, after which every session would 
produce a greed screen on the frozen vic. Only a reboot will fix the green 
screen problem. But then after 5 mins of starting AG, I'm back to the frozen 
screen problem.

Step 4: AG2.3 versus AG2.4, I was very excited when I saw that the screen 
did not freeze up after five minutes. But alas after about 15 mins or so I 
get a frozen window, and will show up as a green screen everytime after 
that. Only a reboot will fix that problem, and would eventually freeze up 
again.

Step 5::Move 1 capture card to another machine, as it seems to be able to 
handle 2 just fine. But it appears that even in this case VIC would cause a 
frozen screen on one of the windows. And the usual green screen appears. The 
one with just 1 works perfectly. 

So I'm kind of running out of ideas, since the capture cards on their own 
pass the burn in test. Software capture tests all pass. The VIC however 
mysteriously causes a frozen screen followed by a green screen in next vic 
startup. 

Any suggestions would be most welcome. Kind of running out of hair to pull 
aswell. Thanks in advance.

Proshanta
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/ag-tech/attachments/20050903/e111a528/attachment.htm>