[mythtv-users] Firmware not found?!

[Rich West]

This isn't entirely a mythtv question, so I apologize in advanced.  It
is with regard to my mythtv system as a whole, and since others may have
a similar setup and gone down the same rabbit hole to reach their own
solution, I thought it was worth asking here (google only has me
tumbling down the hole further).

I forced myself to go down the route of upgrading the backend and all
frontends to Fedora 19 and MythTV 0.27 (I was at 0.25).  Everything went
smoothly, and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the newer features
on the frontend.  My backend is somewhat older, but it does the job.. 3
PVR-150's, a dual-core AMD X2 4000+, 2GB ram, dedicated OS drive and two
500GB TV stores (movies are on another machine served out from NFS).

After my last fiasco with going to Fedora 18 (then backing down to
Fedora 17 and the 3.3.4 kernel), I made the jump figuring that the
driver issues had to have been cleared up by now.  Unfortunately, I was
wrong.  The VIA drivers (that's the chipset on this motherboard) are
terribly broken in anything greater than 3.3.4.  Under 3.3.4, the system
runs fine.  Under anything greater, the system will run fine anywhere
from 10 minutes to 3 hours before it exhibits drive failures, network
failures, or both.

Anyhow, that's a kernel issue.. so I rolled back to the Fedora 17 kernel
3.3.4-5 and life was good again.  However, now it isn't finding the
firmware for my PVR-150's!

[   81.795911] ivtv0: Unable to open firmware v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw (must
be 376836 bytes)
[   81.796828] ivtv0: Did you put the firmware in the hotplug firmware
directory?
[   81.797875] ivtv0: Retry loading firmware
...
This happens for each card.

And the files are there: ls -l /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 262144 May 26  2006 /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-dec.fw
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 376836 Feb 17  2007 /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 155648 May 26  2006
/lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-init.mpg

Now, /lib is a symbolic link to /usr/lib with the newer layout (Fedora18
and above?), so I'm not sure if that is freaking it out.  I'd just like
to get this back in to working order so as to restore TV services while
looking in to what the nextgen build should be.

I do have another motherboard with an nVidia chipset on it which might
solve the kernel related issue, and I am close to just swapping
motherboards and dealing with the mass renaming of devices if it will
get me out of this mess. :)  But, I would rather solve the problem than
mask it.

Also, another question, what are people using for capture cards in the
newer systems?  Are they using cards, or are they shelling out hundreds
for the happauge HD-PVRs (and if so, is the USB bus able to keep up with
multiple HD-PVR's streaming at the same time?)

-Rich