Getting Leadtek WinFast pxDVR3200 H working

[Penguinator]

These are a PCI express card with a digital tv tuner (and FM but have not tried that yet)
I bought one of these to watch TV using kaffeine, thought I would share the tips on how to get it working.

running FC15 x86_64 on Sandy Bridge, ASUS mobo.
lspci reports (with and without -n option)
02:00.0 0400: 14f1:8852 (rev 04)
02:00.0 Multimedia video controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. CX23885 PCI Video and Audio Decoder (rev 04)


Anyway, when first firing kaffeine up and trying to tune some channels, it causes a segfault in the xc4000 support kmod (kernel module). (Despite it being a cx23885 decoder, it has a xc4000 tuner chip)

Turns out that this is (a) a bug in the module, and (b) happens when the right firmware is not present.
If you look carefully through dmesg output you will see where it is whining.

Firmware to be downloaded to various devices lives in /lib/firmware.

I grabbed the firmware from istvanv.users.sourceforge.net/v4l/xc4000.html

The direct link to the firmware I used is istvanv.users.sourceforge.net/v4l/xc4000-1.4.fw

Copy it into /lib/firmware as the file "dvb-fe-xc4000-1.4.fw".
Reboot (to force the startup process to load the card with the new firmware) and enjoy !

NB I didn't need to apply any patches or fixes to the kernel, simply had to get a copy of the firmware installed.

[Penguinator]

This card has broken under Fedora 17 for kernel 3.4.3-1.fc17.x86_64 (possibly others, have not checked)

Basically viewing dmesg you see that the cx23885 driver loads correctly and detects the right card
"CORE cx23885[0]: subsystem: 107d:6f39, board: Leadtek Winfast PxDVR3200 H XC4000 [card=31,autodetected]"

but then later the support module for the zl10353 is not loaded automatically by modprobe, and instead of seeing "DVB: registering new adapter (cx23885[0])" you get some whining about not being able to find zl10353_attach()

This seems due to broken module dependencies (depmod is supposed to figure all this out automatically) and basically the zl10353 module needs to be loaded before the cx23885 module.

Simply add a file called xxxx.conf (use anything for xxxx) into /etc/modprobe.d with the contents shown between the quotes below

"install cx23885 /sbin/modprobe/zl10353; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install cx23885"

Then reboot, done.