[mythtv-users] Mythtv on CentOS5 with PVR-350?

Tue Jan 1 01:15:10 UTC 2008

(warning - long rambling document that hopefully someone can provide 
some insight on)

the default test for ivtv seems to be
cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg

which works fine for me.  so in theory ivtv is working, right?

I get no error messages when it dies in either /var/log/messages or 
/var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log

I tried an older kernel
2.6.18-8.el5

which changes the results. When I select "Watch TV" I get a myth error message:
"MythTV is already using all available inputs for the channel you 
selected. If you want to watch an in-progress recording, select one 
from the playback menu. If you want to watch live TV, cancel one of 
the in-progress recordings from the delete menu".

In looking at mythtvsetup, I no longer have video0. Curious.

Retesting with 2.6.18-53.1.4.el5 just to validate - yup still fails. 
(once I set up the video again)

Since my mouse display is quirky under 2.6.18-8.el5, I went back to 
2.6.18-53.1.4.el5

So I worked through the ivtv instructions (again *sigh*). This time I 
went ahead and recompiled everything.
ivtv-0.10.6.tar.gz
tar -xvf ivtv-0.10.6.tar.gz
cd ivtv-0.10.6
make
sudo make install

What the heck is udev? I have < 1000 files in /dev, so I don't think 
need to update modules.conf
udevinfo, version 095

Instead I need udev rules, which is cryptically explained in the ivtv 
instructions, which presume I've heard of udev. More researching....
so I'd update /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules but I can't make head 
nor tails of it.

So we're going to update modules.conf (what I did previously that had 
it mostly working). Anyone?

So next we stop the mythbackend (because ivtv says anything using the 
driver should stop)
and remove the modules
[root at glutton dev]# /sbin/rmmod ivtv cx25840 tuner tveeprom msp3400 
wm8775 tda9887 saa7115 saa7127
ERROR: Module cx25840 does not exist in /proc/modules
ERROR: Module wm8775 does not exist in /proc/modules

Guess you can't remove something not there.

and load the module
/sbin/modprobe ivtv

and then test

cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg

which plays with mplayer /tmp/test.mpg
(which puts me back to where I was when I started this thread.)  I 
believe at this point the ivtv driver is working

I have the pvr-350, but

dd if=/dev/video of=/dev/video16 bs=64k

reportsdd: opening `/dev/video16': No such device or address

since at the moment I don't care about tvout I'm not that worried 
about it (later I will be).

Troubleshooting:
[root at glutton dev]# find /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ -name ivtv.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.18-53.1.4.el5/updates/drivers/media/video/ivtv.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.18-53.1.4.el5/kernel/drivers/media/video/ivtv/ivtv.ko

modprobe ivtv returns in dmesg
ivtv:  ==================== START INIT IVTV ====================
ivtv:  version 0.10.6 (tagged release) loading
ivtv:  Linux version: 2.6.18-53.1.4.el5 SMP mod_unload gcc-4.1
ivtv:  In case of problems please include the debug info between
ivtv:  the START INIT IVTV and END INIT IVTV lines, along with
ivtv:  any module options, when mailing the ivtv-users mailinglist.
ivtv0: Autodetected Hauppauge card (cx23415 based)
PCI: Enabling device 0000:01:08.0 (0000 -> 0002)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:08.0[A] -> Link [APC1] -> GSI 16 (level, 
low) -> IRQ 209
ivtv0: loaded v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw firmware (376836 bytes)
ivtv0: loaded v4l-cx2341x-dec.fw firmware (262144 bytes)
ivtv0: Encoder revision: 0x02060039
ivtv0: Decoder revision: 0x02020023
tveeprom 2-0050: Hauppauge model 48132, rev K268, serial# 9956444
tveeprom 2-0050: tuner model is LG TAPE H001F MK3 (idx 68, type 47)
tveeprom 2-0050: TV standards NTSC(M) (eeprom 0x08)
tveeprom 2-0050: audio processor is MSP4448 (idx 27)
tveeprom 2-0050: decoder processor is SAA7115 (idx 19)
tveeprom 2-0050: has radio, has IR receiver, has no IR transmitter
ivtv0: Autodetected Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350
tuner' 2-0043: chip found @ 0x86 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
tda9887 2-0043: tda988[5/6/7] found
tuner' 2-0061: chip found @ 0xc2 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
saa7115' 2-0021: saa7115 found (1f7115d0e100000) @ 0x42 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
saa7127 2-0044: saa7129 found @ 0x88 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
msp3400' 2-0040: MSP4448G-A2 found @ 0x80 (ivtv i2c driver #0)
msp3400' 2-0040: MSP4448G-A2 supports radio, mode is autodetect and autoselect
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device video0 for encoder MPEG (4 MB)
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device video0 for encoder YUV (2 MB)
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device vbi-224 for encoder VBI (1 MB)
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device video0 for encoder PCM audio (1 MB)
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device radio-64 for encoder radio
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device video0 for decoder MPEG (1 MB)
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device vbi-224 for decoder VBI (1 MB)
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device vbi-224 for decoder VOUT
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
ivtv0: Registered device video0 for decoder YUV (1 MB)
ivtv0: loaded v4l-cx2341x-init.mpg firmware (155648 bytes)
tuner-simple 2-0061: type set to 47 (LG NTSC (TAPE series))
tuner' 2-0043: Tuner frontend module has no way to set config
tuner' 2-0043: Tuner frontend module has no way to set config
tuner' 2-0043: Tuner frontend module has no way to set config
ivtv0: Initialized Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350, card #0
ivtv:  ====================  END INIT IVTV  ====================

Except for :
videodev: "" has no release callback. Please fix your driver for 
proper sysfs support, see http://lwn.net/Articles/36850/
it all looks ok, at that looks like from some quick reading about 
sysfs, that the driver isn't written with sysfs support.

lspci reports":
01:08.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC15 
MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)

No idea how to tell if I have

PVR-350 with Philips FM1216ME MK5 tuner

but I added to /etc/modprobe.conf

options ivtv tuner=38

anyway.
ivtv troubleshooting reports:

Lock up when loading ivtv module (udev related)

There is a rule in udev that causes the system to lock up. Commenting 
out the below rule has been reported to fix the problem. The rule 
files can be found in /etc/udev/rules.d/.

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="firmware", ENV{FIRMWARE}=="*", 
RUN="/sbin/firmware_helper", OPTIONS="last_rule"

so I remark out that line in 05-udev-early.rules

no idea how to work around

udev causes ivtv to lock the system

For some unknown reason people experience locks with udev 
version >087. At this moment there is no work around other then 
downgrading to <=udev-087

Some people have found disabling udev coldplugging and placing ivtv 
in modules autoload file is a workable solution

so for now we'll let that lie.

And we reboot just to see what happens. . .

Watch TV now reports the earlier message:

"MythTV is already using all available inputs for the channel you 
selected. If you want to watch an in-progress recording, select one 
from the playback menu. If you want to watch live TV, cancel one of 
the in-progress recordings from the delete menu".

and under mythtvsetup > Input it says it can't open video0. hrm.

well lets take out
options ivtv tuner=38  of modprobe.conf

and reboot again. huh, same error.

and mythtvsetup can no longer connect to video0, and there are no 
video devices in /dev. great.

reenable
install ivtv /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ivtv; /sbin/modprobe ivtv-fb
in modprobe.con

so we reboot, only to find that I now get kernel panics, and the box 
no longer boots

Fortunately booting to the old kernel still works.

so much for that! back it goes into remark-land.

Sigh

At 04:37 AM 12/31/2007, Axel Thimm wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 07:44:08AM +0100, Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
> > Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> > > mythtv at corwyn.net writes:
> > >
> > >> CentOS5, kernel 2.6.18-53.1.4.el5
> > >
> > >> However, whenever I start mythfrontend and select "Watch TV" the box
> > >> locks up. I lose video, ssh sessions, and the box no longer pings.
> > >
> > > Your kernel is crashing.
> > >
> > > Make sure that you've updated to the latest kernel. For Fedora 8, the
> > > latest kernel is 2.6.23.9. Make sure you've installed the latest ivtv
> > > and the latest xf86-video-ivtv driver.
> > >
> > On kernel 2.6.23.9 ivtv is included in the kernel, Please do not install
> > older ivtv over the in-kernel version, also as there are significant
> > kernel interface differences between 2.6.18 and 2.6.23.
>
>The OP mentioned CentOS5, where the latest kernel is 2.6.18-*.
>
>And on 2.6.23.* having a PVR-350 run is a nightmare, as the fb kernel
>module is *not* partz of the kernel and one needs to find properly
>synced kernel ivtv sources and out-of-kernel ivtvfb sources to make
>that play well. On 2.6.18 OTOH it should work out of the box with the
>ivtv-kmdls. So the OP's bets of getting the PVR-350 to work are better
>on CentOS5 actually than any recent Fedora distro.
>
>Back on the original topic: mythtv at corwyn.net, you should get ivtv and
>ivtvfb working w/o going through mythtv in order to see what is
>happening underneath the hood. I would get on the ivtv lists and check
>on the ivtv wiki on how to do the diagnosis and see whether the ivtv
>or the ivtvfb module are creating this. Or maybe some other module
>altogether like nvidia, e.g. try to run this w/o the nvidia module if
>you were using that until now.
>
>And if you get this straightened out, please do a summary reply to
>this thread so people know what it was, thanks!
>
> > > After updating to the latest and greatest, my box is definitely more
> > > stable. I still get a kernel crash, every once in a while, but it's
> > > much better now.
>--
>Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>mythtv-users mailing list
>mythtv-users at mythtv.org
>http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users

Rick Steeves
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