HVR1600 PCI card almost does not work in a linux box

[nealzimm]

vvvmay;

I am guilty of not reading your original post - closely.
Your card is working.
Fedora recognizes the card.
VLC is using the card as much as it can.

The problem looks to be that there is not a playlist of TV stations for VLC to
work with. The playlist contains the text to display for the station, the frequency the
station is transmitting on and what subchannels are used for secondary video/audio streams.

w_scan will not work with a DVB card. You can try the following: I verified that it all works
when I was in Milwaukee last weekend.

If dvb-apps is not installed, do the following:

su -c 'yum install dvb-apps'

Next:

su -c 'scandvb /usr/share/dvb-apps/atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB > /home/YOURACCOUNT/Desktop/channels.conf'

This will generate a series of messages as scandvb tries each of the 69 center frequencies:

scanning /usr/share/dvb-apps/atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB
using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0' and '/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0'
>>> tune to: 57028615:8VSB
WARNING: >>> tuning failed!!!
>>> tune to: 57028615:8VSB (tuning failed)
WARNING: >>> tuning failed!!!
>>> tune to: 63028615:8VSB
WARNING: >>> tuning failed!!!
>>> tune to: 63028615:8VSB (tuning failed)


When it hits a good frequency, you will see something like:

>>> tune to: 201028615:8VSB
service is running. Channel number: 11:1. Name: 'KARE-HD'
service is running. Channel number: 11:2. Name: 'Weather'

When it is finished, open the channels.conf file on your desktop with a text editor and you
should see a series of lines like:

KARE-HD:201028615:8VSB:49:52:3
Weather:201028615:8VSB:65:68:4

Close the editor and right click on channels.conf, choose to open it with vlc. You should now be able to view
each station on the list. There are some "dud" lines in the file - you can clean them out as you see fit.

I'll watch here to see your results.

[AndrewSerk]

Originally Posted by nealzimm

w_scan will not work with a DVB card.

w_scan works fine on dvb cards, in fact, it finds two more channels than scandvb does here.

a snippet from info of w_scan:

The w_scan tool is similar to dvbscan from dvb-apps. However it
: does not require initial tuning data and thus is able to find more
: channels.

[nealzimm]

Sorry, but for two reasons, I disagree.

First, when group at LinuxTV.org were first developing the drivers for the Hauppauge HVR1600 and Linux, they stated that w_scan would be modified to detect ATSC signals later (I don't know why, they just did).

The second reason is I can run w_scan on my own system and it errors out. I tried the switches that you recommended using and w_scan errored out for most of them, starting with -c. The following shows the switches I used and the resulting error messages. I also did a directory list that shows why it failed.

[Neal@mack ~]$ su -c 'w_scan -f t -F -t 2 -x -vvv > /home/Neal/Desktop/w_scantest2.conf'
Password:
w_scan version 20070909
Info: using DVB adapter auto detection.
Info: unable to open frontend /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0'
Info: unable to open frontend /dev/dvb/adapter2/frontend0'
Info: unable to open frontend /dev/dvb/adapter3/frontend0'
main:2173: FATAL: ***** NO USEABLE DVB CARD FOUND. *****
Please check wether dvb driver is loaded and
verify that no dvb application (i.e. vdr) is running.
[Neal@mack ~]$ ls -al /dev/dvb
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 60 Mar 25 21:19 .
drwxr-xr-x. 23 root root 3900 Mar 25 21:20 ..
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 120 Mar 25 21:20 adapter0
[Neal@mack ~]$ ls -al /dev/dvb/adapter0
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 120 Mar 25 21:20 .
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 60 Mar 25 21:19 ..
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 0 Mar 25 21:19 demux0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 1 Mar 25 21:19 dvr0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 3 Mar 25 21:20 frontend0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 2 Mar 25 21:19 net0
[Neal@mack ~]$

As you can see, w_scan can not find the card - it's looking for adapter1/2/3 when the correct (?) adapter is 0.

Hope this explains my position on w_scan.

As for the rest, vvvmay states in his first post that he can get one TV channel with VLC. This most likely means that the card is working and sending a signal (most likely tuned to the last channel that M$ had left it at). There still may be a problem with the firmware, but I think not, Fedora does a good job of loading the firmware and will generate an error message if it can not find it.

FWIW, the drivers were referred to as cx18 series, I do not think that they changed that. In fact if you look at the LinuxTV.org site, they will tell you that the cx18 driver are used with CX23418 hardware.

I am sorry about the length, but it seems you were looking for info.

http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
should have all the information needed, including instructions on how to install and setup a tuner card.

For what it is worth, I run Fedora 14 on an Intel Q9550 Core 2 Quad.

Later, it's past my bed time.

[Golf4Fun]

I have the exact same card Hauppauge 1600 in my desktop and it works well in Mandriva,and Ubuntu, using Kaffeine and in Mythbuntu.

Fedora does not see the device video0 and it does not appear under /dev anywhere. I like Fedora but for TV I switched to Mythbuntu