Ok, I had some spare time to continue the search for good BIOS options in order to get my bt878 board to run without black lines and distortions. Let me first note that I have not yet been able to fix this completely, but te adapted BIOS settings are still way better than the default. Meanwhile I found out that there are known issues with the VIA Apollo MVP3 AGP PCI bridge. Sorry I'm so late with this info, but I didn't even see I had this MVP3 on my board and first considered reports about it as a little off topic (after all, my chipset is called VIA Apollo Pro133A, sigh). The Hauppauge FAQs and troubleshooting instructions recommend a number of BIOS settings to fix problems that are similar but not equal to the ones I've observed (e.g, they point at black lines when capturing still images, while "my lines" are seen in normal operation and captures look fine). Hauppauge also adresses lockups, but so far this board is running very stable (to say something positive about it) and I haven't seen any kind of data corruption. The recommended settings regarding the VIA MVP3 are: PCI to DRAM Post Write - enabled OnChip USB - enabled Assign IRQ to USB - enabled CPU to PCI Write Buffer - disabled I've also tried other settings that were recommended for other boards: Assign IRQ to VGA - yes PCI Master 0 WS Write - enabled Latency Timer - to be increased if black dots or lines are observed Peer Concurrency - disabled In addition, I've played around with the BIOS AGP settings. To make a long story "short" the only parameter that actually helped was the already mentioned PCI Clk timing (latency). Disabling PCI Peer Concurrency actually worsened the situation and caused some glass tile effects in the TV window. Everything else seems to be irrelevant (at least in respect to WinTV). So the conclusion would be to *enable* PCI Peer Concurrency and setting the PCI Clk to a value above 48 (default is 32). I've found that choosing values that differ greatly from the 32 default will cause the kernel to reset the latency values for the individual PCI devices to a supposedly sane value. The kernel sort of does it right, so if you set PCI Clk to 0 you will still end up with some ok picture (I know nothing about the kernel at all, so corrections are welcome on what's going on here). There doesn't seem to be a noticable perfomance penalty for increasing the PCI Clk latency, but I still have to verify that. This is certainly a "speed issue", as Gerd Knorr suggested, as I don't see any problems with 16bpp. Choosing a small screen resolution (1024x768) at 24bpp does not help, though. And I wouldn't call a G400 slow, even at 24/32 bpp. As I already said, I had no problems with the BX chipset, with exactly the same configuration (soft/hardware, even first forgot to change the chipset specs in the 2.4.2-kernel, but that didn't help either) Even with all these settings, there are still distortions when other windows are moved and (really bad ones) under heavy disk i/o. At least the latter should not effect the graphics board's performance. As I already mentioned, grabbing and recordng is not effected. My guess is a dma issue. I'm still a little too shy to send this to the kernel list (this is only a "cosmetic" thing), but it will go to Hauppauge, Epox, and VIA. Some additional info that might be of interest: Epox D3VA (VIA Apollo Pro 133A with HPT 370 IDE controller enabled) Dual PIII 866 (FCPGA - FSB 133) 512 MB infineon PC133 (CL 2) Matrox G-400 DH 32MB Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 Tekram DC-390 UW SCSI (SB AWE 64 Value (ISA) - mentioned in first report, meanwhile replaced) SB 1024 Live (PCI) RedHat 7.0 fully patched (glibc 2.2.12 etc.) Kernel 2.4.2-ac-2 XFree 4.0.2 xawtv 3.37-3.40 # lspci -H 1 00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C691 [Apollo PRO] (rev c4) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C598 [Apollo MVP3 AGP] 00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 ISA [Apollo PRO] (rev 23) 00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586 IDE [Apollo] (rev 10) 00:09.0 SCSI storage controller: Symbios Logic Inc. (formerly NCR) 53c875 (rev 03) 00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 (rev 02) 00:0a.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 (rev 02) 00:0b.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Triones Technologies, Inc. HPT366 (rev 03) 00:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 05) 00:0d.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10000 (rev 08) 00:0d.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! (rev 08) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G400 AGP (rev 03) 2 disks are at the VIA IDE controller (with UDMA-66 enabled) The onboard HPT370 is also active with 3 disks attached to it (UDMA-100, UDMA-66) Sorry for the lengthy report Amir
