[mythtv-users] WinTV USB2 & PVR-USB2 (was re: Has anyone seen a USB DVB-T adapter work with)

Rod Smith mythtv at rodsbooks.com
Sun Mar 25 22:20:54 UTC 2007


On Sunday 25 March 2007 16:17, michael papet wrote:
> While not DVB experience, I tried 3 different hauppauge devices and only
> one works.
>
> USBPVR2.
>
> Don't confuse this device with the WinTV USB2  which doesn't work.  Debian
> Etch and Knoppmyth finds the device, creates /dev/video0 and /dev/vbi0.  It
> even sets up easy in mythtv-setup. But actually watching tv errors out
> "can't access /dev/video0.  tvtime works (and looks great btw)  kdetv
> doesn't work, same error as mythtv.

I don't have the WinTV USB2, so I can't be sure this will work, but: Have you 
tried using an external tuning script, possibly with a delay incorporated 
into it? I recently discovered that this was necessary to get reliable tuning 
with an AVerMedia AVerTV M150-D. This device is entirely unrelated to the 
Hauppauge WinTV USB2, but the symptom you describe sounds like it may be a 
similar cause to what I think was causing problems with the M150-D -- 
specifically, the device needs a brief period to settle before being accessed 
after tuning, and MythTV is trying to access the device too quickly. If my 
hypothesis is correct, the workaround (an external tuning script) is 
relatively easy to implement. I note that at least some DVB devices provide 
an option in MythTV to incorporate such a delay, but there's no similar 
option for framegrabber or MPEG-2 devices. Perhaps there should be....?

> You need to build a kernel from source on the machine to build usbpvr2. 
> The guy has excellent docs, so it's not too bad if you are okay compiling
> kernels.  Nice, low cpu overhead when using this device.  FYI there's no
> /dev/vbi0 in the driver yet.

In theory, you should be able to build the driver if you install your 
distribution's kernel source package, even if you don't build the kernel 
yourself. Also, the pvrusb2 driver is included in recent (2.6.18 and later, 
IIRC) kernels, although as of the 2.6.20 kernel, the driver included with the 
kernel is a bit old and has some reliability issues, so you're better off 
building the kernel provided by Isely (the driver's developer).

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com


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