Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950
From MythTV
Updates: This card now has ATSC support in the V4L main tree. A recent V4L cvs will have support for this tuner. Also note there are bugs in Ubuntu Hardy which prevent building the mrec driver for this tuner properly, Markus Rechberger has provided prebuilt .debs to solve that problem. Check out the links to the precompiled packages that can be found here.
This card uses the em28xx drivers that the pinnacle HD pro sticks use. In Ubuntu and most other distros, some custom dvb module installation is needed. See mcentral here for step by step instructions. If you install the drivers properly, this card will work with the latest version of mythtv (as of 3/9/2008).
According to Linux TV.org, this tuner has two potential driver sources: a current v4l cvs driver that supports analog video and ATSC, and support from mcentral, in em2880. If you use the mcentral driver, it is the same one that the Pinnacle HD Pro stick uses (so you can use both tuners at once). See mcentral here for step by step instructions. At this point I have got the ATSC working from V4L cvs, so if you have this card you no longer need to use the mcentral driver, which is not in the mainline V4L. Hopefully some compatibility issues can be avoided this way. See the V4L updated drivers section at the bottom for more.
The linuxtv wiki states that you should download the windows driver and extract the firmware from it. However, if you use the em2880 driver from mcentral, you need the same firmware as the Pinnacle HD pro stick referenced in the mcentral.de install guide: http://konstantin.filtschew.de/v4l-firmware/firmware_v4.tgz, worked just fine for me. After I had an already installed and working pinnacle HD pro stick, I simply plugged one of these into a free usb port and it powered up and was ready to go; no further config was needed beyond adding a new tuner in mythtv-setup.
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Main Features
- OTA digital tuning (ATSC/8VSB)
- Analog tuner built in
- Included antenna is adequate
- Comes with USB extension cable, remote, and aux input cable
Main Disadvantages
- This product does not have hardware encoding, so the system requirements are quite high.
- It appears that it may not tune QAM; the manual also states that this does not tune clear QAM, so there is probably not much hope of getting that working.
Caveats
I do not have any installation issues to list, because it was plug-and-play in my current system (only because I had a pinnacle HD pro stick already installed). The issues installing this from scratch may or may not be similar to those with the HD pro stick.
Updated V4L Drivers
Update: Instructions for PVR-950 on Hardy Heron are here: http://u32.net/MythTV/WinTV-HVR-950/
Recently I installed this tuner in another machine and got the V4L drivers to work instead of mcentral's. The quickest way is to do the following:
download the firmware first: wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
Extract the file hcw85bda.sys from the zip into the current dir: unzip -j HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip Driver85/hcw85bda.sys
download the V4L tarball from http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb I used the tarball from Wed, 14 May 2008 23:14:04. The tarball has a version number: 9d04bba82511
I compiled this v4l tree on Ubuntu 8.04, with any 2.6.24-xx kernel (I tried on -16, -18, and -19 and it worked on each of them). It seems you need a very recent kernel for the latest v4l to work.
Next, go into the v4l/linux/Documentation/video4linux directory, there will be a file called extract_xc3028.pl Copy this file into the directory where you originally placed hcw85bda.sys. Run the file with the command: ./extract_xc3028.pl
Copy the resulting firmware file into /lib/firmware: cp xc3028-v27.fw /lib/firmware
after compiling, the modules em28xx and em28xx-dvb loaded automatically for the HVR950 on reboot. It appears that the DVB part is recording properly.
Good news is that the IVTV drivers are included in this latest V4L, and so my PVR-150 works simultaneously with this HVR950. With the mcentral drivers I had a problem where this and the Pinnacle HD pro stick would not coexist with the PVR-150, since there seemed to be incompatibilities between the mcentral drivers and several of the mainline V4L drivers. Thankfully that is no longer a problem.
