[mythtv-users] Noob Problem with M179

Jack Trout witmore1 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 24 03:28:13 UTC 2005


On 8/23/05, KeithRocheck at aol.com <KeithRocheck at aol.com> wrote:
> Okay, I have been working on getting my tower working (specs below for
> reference).  We'll start off with my tuner cards (2 AVerMedia M179s).  The
> one assigned to /dev/video0 increments the channels by one (so channel 5
> ends up being channel 6), but this does not occur for /dev/video1.  Trying
> my best to rule out a hardware problem, I called AVerMedia and the guy said
> he never heard of a problem like that and blamed it on me using Linux.  It
> was a shot.  I did some searching around but did not seem to find a solution
> or even an occurance of this.  Any help is greatly appreciated.
>  
>  AMD Athlon 2400+
> 1024MB SDRAM
> 400GB videos partition (2x200GB HDDs RAID 0) + 160GB for else (2x160GB HDDs
> RAID 1)
> 2xAVerMedia M179
> Fedora Core 3
>  


Jarod Wilson Has used this card and his site talks about what he had
to do to use it, although currently his site isnt responding from my
location so using google cache, I copied and pasted the relevant
section

typically found at http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

here is the cache link I used to find this if I missed any important
info, if the link wont work, try searching google for the page listed
above and click on "search googles cache for this page"

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:0XW7MVoaWtsJ:wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php+&hl=en&lr=&strip=1

As for users of the M179 (and probably Yuan MPG600), tuner detection
(and possibly msp detection) doesn't work on these cards just yet, so
you may have to manually specify them, like so:

# ivtv modules setup
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
alias tveeprom tveeprom-ivtv
options ivtv tuner=2
options msp3400 once=0 simpler=1 simple=0 
Users of the PVR-350 will need an additional line if they want to
enable TV-Out, so their modprobe.conf additions should look like this:

# ivtv modules setup
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
alias tveeprom tveeprom-ivtv
install ivtv /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ivtv; /sbin/modprobe ivtv-fb

NOTE: Most of the PVR-350 TV-Out information contained here is derived
from the TvOutHowto on the ivtv wiki site, with slight modifications
to be Fedora/Red Hat specific (and subsequent changes for 2.6
kernels).

We're going to make little modification to the kernel boot line in
your grub.conf file that should force the ivtv frame buffer to load on
/dev/fb1, as well as allow the ivtv-fb module to be loaded and
unloaded. Without doing this, unloading the ivtv-fb module would
probably crash your system. To the end of all 'kernel /vmlinuz...'
lines in /boot/grub/grub.conf, append 'vga=791', then reboot your
system. This tells the kernel to load a frame buffer for your video
card at 1024x768, 16-bit color. I use this all the time myself, simply
so I can see more when I'm not in X. I'd always done this on my
350-equipped box without even thinking about it, which could explain
some of why I've not run into some of the problems other folks have...

Now try loading up the ivtv driver:

# /sbin/depmod -a
# /sbin/modprobe ivtv 
If you run into problems along the lines of a message saying memory
can't be allocated when trying to either modprobe ivtv or use the card
(like cat'ing video from /dev/video0), many folks seem to need to use
the following command:

echo 16384 > /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes 
Not sure why this is necessary for some folks and not for others (I
don't seem to need it). But if that helps, make it permanent with an
entry in /etc/sysctl.conf:

# echo "# Fix ivtv memory allocation problems" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
# echo "vm.min_free_kbytes=16384" >> /etc/sysctl.conf


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