Every now and again I try to setup a myth tv box just to see how it is progressing and lately I have been really surprised. I am a big fan of both knoppmyth and mythdora for making such an easy way to get your mythbox up and going. I still have a few minor issues but I am happy to say that yes most thing are working. I downloaded both from files.bigpond which made life easy! Here is my setup on my old hardware:

System Setup

System: AMD 2800 (2083MHz) runing on an Asus Motherboard (Piece of crap MB! Lan and Sound Dead)
TV Card: DVICO FusionHDTV Dual DVB-T
Remote: Fusion MCE Remote that came with the card. This remotes ir receiver is plugged into the card via what looks like a sound jack.

The card was a little expensive at the time ($300) but i wanted two tuners so i could record while watching.

Anyway i tried this setup using both distros:

MythDora 3.2 http://g-ding.tv

I tried this first as i very familiar with fedora having used it since version 3. Again I am still a linux newbie but can find my way around and I like using gnome. I had very similar problems in both knoppmyth and mythdora.

Install was straight forward. After the initial setup i was greeted with a familiar desktop. Linux detected 1 of my 2 tuners and the remote didn't work. Time to poke around in linux.

I headed over to /dev/ and found that yes dvb was there. so:
cd /dev/dvb

unfortunatly only /dev/dvb/adapter0 was there.

So I had a look around on the forums to see what i was supposed to see. Looks like the second tuner is a usb one (this is why you have to plug the usb loop back into your card). Maybe it was some usb device...

/dev/hiddev0 not there
/dev/usb not there

There was a /dev/bus/usb/001/003 that would disapear and reapear each time i removed the usb loop back thingy. A site suggested that i type in dmesg and look for anything interesting:



does the /2 mean that it can see the second reciever? Personally i think it is detecting the composite (aerial) and svideo in.

dmesg should show it detecting the second reciever each time i plug it in right? So here goes. I unplug the usb cord and plaug it back in... and this appears at the bottom of my dmesg:



Oh crap.. this kernel or the modules don't know about my second tuner?!? This also doesn't bode well for my remote because under windows if i unplug my usb loopback the remote stops working. Checking the kernel version they are running 2.6.18... 2.6.20 is out but i wont be installing that and making a mess of things.

At least i have 1 tuner working and I set up using the following:

#mythtv-setup

Capture Card Setup - Works
This setup found my channels. Although the name of my card was incorrect.

Card Type: DVB DTV capture card (v3.x)
Dvb Card Number: 0
Frontend: Zarlink MT352 DVB-T

Capure Card Setup - Mis-configurations
These configs didn't work. Firstly trying to find the second tuner:

Card Type: DVB DTV capture card (v3.x)
Dvb Card Number: 1
Frontend: Could not open card number 1

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Try different drivers, This detected the name of my card correctly but failed to find any channels.

Card Type: pcHDTV DTV capture card (w/V4L drivers)
video devcice: /dev/video0 (yes /dev/video0 exists)
Name: DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Dig [cx8800]

Live TV

Woohoo at least my channels were detected. And it found all of them! Up pops mythfrontend so i hit live tv. What a disapointment the tv was coming through choppy. Looks like about 2-3 fps (dunno how to check exactly what this is - any ideas?)

Okies lets check to see if my video card was working properly. I have in an elcheapo ATI card and checked out how to install it at:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-I ... 8740.shtml

one of the lines to determine if it is working properly is:
#glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes

Cool it is working properly....but unfortunatly this is the last straw. I am not watching choppy tv. Time to see if knoppmyth is any better

KnoppMyth R5E50 http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html

This is a smaller distro. It can fit onto 1CD. Not that it really matters cause i burn everything to dvd now anyway to get better read times. Installation was good except it looked like a few things failed in the setup. Like when it asked for an american zip code for weather or something.

Again only 1 tuner was detected and the remote didnt work. same dmesg saying it dint know what was plugged in. /dev/dvb/adapter0 was the only 1 there.

Same myth-setup. All the chanels were detected so there was only 1 thing left to do. check out live tv.

Live TV

OMG! The tv was coming through crystal clear at full frame rate! Well im going to have a play with this one now but there are still a few annoyances:

#1 No browser except for lynx (yuck) and mythbrowser. I will work out how to get firefox on there hopefully. Or need to work out mythbrowser better. Doesnt work like I think it should. How do you type in an address... shouldn't the arrow keys allow you to edit the url?

#2 my remote and second tuner still dont work.

--
On a side note i disable the au_tv_grabber and use the following HOWTO to update my tv listings:
SITE: http://tvguide.org.au
HOWTO at http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bi...w/TVGuide/MythTV

--

My Questions are:

1. Is it possible for me to setup the second tuner?
2. Is it possible to get the remote working?

After reading this thread

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12397

I found this:

http://www.linuxtv.org/download/dvb/fir ... bird-01.fw

but still gives the same usb error from dmesg:



Checked the remote was working in windows and it is. Still cant fire this baby up in knoppmyth??

So, does KnoppMyth win hands down over MythDora?! I'd suggest checking linuxtv.org and lirc.org for details about the remote. If the remote is support under Lnux, you should be able to get it working w/ KnoppMyth. If you provide details on how you got it working, we'll made it work out the box.

Found this over at linuxtv... perhaps i am putting the firmware in at the wrong place? Dont know:
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVICO
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB_U ... onHDTV_USB

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DViCO FusionHDTV USB

This class of usb devices is codenamed, Bluebird.

All devices below are fully supported by the LinuxTV driver. The following drivers are needed for these devices:

- lgdt330x.ko
- mt352.ko
- zl10353.ko
- dvb-usb.ko
- dvb-usb-cxusb.ko

These frontend(s)/demodulator(s) can be found in various revisions of this device:

- LG Electronics DT3303
- Zarlink MT352
- Zarlink ZL10353


device/model type firmware name comments/quirks URL/pictures
DViCO FusionHDTV 5 USB Gold USB2.0 dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw [90]
DViCO FusionHDTV USB DVB-T USB2.0 dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw There is a working Mac driver written by John Dalgliesh. http://www.defyne.org [91]
DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual USB USB2.0 dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw [92]
---

Also here is a picture of my card:
http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/ENG/Product ... gital.aspx

Here is the output from lsusb

when i ran lsmod I noticed that these last two drivers werent loaded.. is the usb driver supposed to load them when it is plugged in?



I loaded them manually using:



Is there anyway to make this permanent? Not that it seemed to make a difference when i plugged the usb back in.

At the top of this page:
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB_U ... onHDTV_USB

it says that i need to make sure that these modules are loaded:



I can find modules crc16 and libcrc32c but not crc32. perhaps I need a newer kernel?

oh and instead of the insmod lines you can just use:


.

Woohooo! Finally found my problem.. and it is so simple:

edit /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

change the line



/dev/dvb now shows adapter0 and adapter1
cat /dev/input/event2 now shows data when the remote is used

only took me 4 days

oh yea... you don't have to do those modprobe lines either!

Booted the thing up this morning and it was failing to work again... piece of *^%^. So again when i unplugged the usb and plugged it back in I had the dmesg:



So I reset my /etc/modprobe.d/aliases back to normal because this was now not the fix... it was more likely some fluke... but now I know it can detect the damn hardware. Looking at the error I noticed ehci_hcd which i think is the usb2.0 driver. So I did this:

rmmod ehci_hcd

then the dmesg said this:



OOh that looks promising! but it is still having errors... uhci_hcd looks like the usb1.1 driver?? and this is a usb2.0 device. Ok we will put the ehci_hcd driver back in.

modprobe ehci_hcd

then dmesg:


Woohoo! now the question is why does this work? Do the drivers have to be loaded in a certain order? and how do you do this?