[mythtv-users] PVR-150 on CentOS 5: where to put IVTV firmware

[Sam Hooker]

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I'm probably admitting "hopeless dinosaur" status, but I've just rebuilt my *standard def* mythbackend box using the same old pair of PVR-150s (I think this is the fourth incarnation using these tuners -- starting w/FC4, then 6, then 9), and wanted to share an observation. This time around, I jumped ship on Fedora and decided to use Centos 5 (currently, kernel 2.6.18-164.15.1.el5.centos.plus, video4linux-kmdl for that kernel installed via RPM), and this is the first time that I've experienced any trouble with IVTV creating usable /dev/video* devices. I was getting kernel messages like these:

ivtv0: Unable to open firmware v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw (must be 376836 bytes)
ivtv0: Did you put the firmware in the hotplug firmware directory?
ivtv0: Retry loading firmware
...
ivtv1: Unable to open firmware v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw (must be 376836 bytes)
ivtv1: Did you put the firmware in the hotplug firmware directory?
ivtv1: Retry loading firmware


and /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log messages like these:

2010-03-24 13:31:32.761 TVRec(4) Error: Problem finding starting channel, setting to default of '3'.
2010-03-24 13:31:34.021 Channel(/dev/video1)::Open(): Can't open video device, error "No such device or address"


and, of course, this:

[root at theoden ~]# cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg
cat: /dev/video0: No such device or address


The long and short of it is that my searches brought me to an old thread from 2006[1], which made me go hunting for the firmware and the "hotplug firmware" directory and, after a few tries, I'm back in business.

So, if you happen to be experiencing this problem under these circumstances, grab the firmware[2], expand it, stick the resulting files (v4l-*) in /lib/firmware, 'rmmod ivtv; modprobe ivtv', and you could experience the "/dev/video Love".

Disclaimer: It's entirely likely that this is well-known. If so, ignore me. I was trying to cram in this fix over lunch, and didn't have time to comb all the canonical sources. Thought I'd share, nonetheless, in the hopes that it gives other folks searching on these errors one more potentially-useful hit. :-)


Cheers,

- -sth

[1]http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2006-April/133948.html
[2]http://dl.ivtvdriver.org/ivtv/firmware/ivtv-firmware.tar.gz
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