[mythtv-users] Another n00b with a (simple?) problem

Daniel Howell howelld at brumster.com
Sat Dec 11 18:16:49 UTC 2004


Hi all,

New to the list and, as with many first time posters I imagine, having
the typical problems. Not actually with MythTV itself (well, some minor
little problems, but one thing at a time, eh?!). If these questions
really need to be directed towards the ivtv mailing list, then fair
enough - tell me to sod orf - but I figure most people here will be
using the cards in the same way I'm planning to - ie. purely for mythtv.
Well, I hope so anyway! Would appreciate any advice or guidance anyone
could offer. First some hardware background :-

XP2200 on Abit mATX motherboard
Onboard VIA sound/network
New Hauppauge PVR350
New Hauppauge NOVA-T (DVB-T) card
nVidia 5200 AGP
Fedora Core 3

Following Jarods guide, I've got all the latest patches and running the
latest kernel, apt has been a wonderful friend and had saved me lots of
hassle. The sound works, the nVidia card works, and the PVR350 works
fine (I installed this first, by itself, to simplify matters).

The NOVA-T card, however, is causing much more grief. I'm not getting
and /dev/dvb device files appear, which from scouring on the internet
seems to be a populat thing. Running the instdev.sh script creates them,
but none of the created devices are valid - dvbtune, for example,
doesn't pull anything valid from them. It seems obvious that the driver
module isn't loading or initialising properly.

The quick and simple question to ask to the list is, does anyone have a
modprobe.conf that includes all the lines for running a PVR350 and NOVAT
in the same machine (on FC3)?

However I'd rather understand what all the bttv, ivtv, cx8800, etc
drivers are actually for, and which ones are needed for each card - and
how I load more than one, associate it with multiple cards, etc. At the
moment, I'm hacking around trying multiple combinations but not really
understanding what I'm doing - and I don't really want to be doing that,
I'd rather what it all means. The commands (alias, install, etc) are
fine - it's just the general structure of the file - for example...

How does "char-major-81" relate to anything?! I mean, how does anyone
know that's what's got to be entered?! What does it *mean*? 81-0 and
81-1 - is that referring to individual PCI instances of cards, or
devices on a PCI card itself (encoder, decoder, tuner for example)?

bttv, ivtv, cx8800 - is my understanding right here.... my current
understanding is that bttv is for bt848 chips, of which the PVR350 uses
it on the tuner only, so I need that. Cx8800 is for the connexant chips,
of which the NOVAT has a couple, so I want that on the NOVA-T card.
Finally, the ivtv driver is purely for the encoder/decoder on the PVR
card (not the tuner). I've browsed so many sites now my mind is a mush
of people saying one thing or another (or, in most cases, telling you to
do something but not explaining why)...

The options parameter - in particular "card" and "tuner" - where is this
magical list of all the options?!

Some lspci outputs/etc are here (save flooding the mail list) :-

http://forums.kustompcs.co.uk/showpost.php?p=207362&postcount=23

If there's anything I'm missing, please shout ;]

All the best,
Dan Howell
Birmingham, UK



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list