[mythtvnz] Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 [ivtv] not supported in 0.25

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:40:14 +1200, you wrote:

>I use Mythbuntu – I have been thinking for some time of upgrading from
>mythtv 0.23 to 0.25 using Mythbuntu 12.04. I have spent the day working on
>it just to find that Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 [ivtv] which I have used for
>years is not supported! I had read the release notes carefully before
>starting the upgrade but there was no mention of this change – that I could
>see. I use the PVR-150 only for the video input from my SKY box.
>
> I have no idea how to resolve this problem – any suggestions – maybe USB
>video capture?
>
>Please be specific as I new to this.
>
>Tim

Since my mother's MythTV box uses a PVR-150 for recording FM radio and
I need to upgrade her to 0.25 soon, I am very interested in this
problem.  And like you I have a PVR-500 in my MythTV box for recording
Sky.  A PVR-500 is basically just a dual PVR-150.

I can not boot my Mythbuntu 12.04 test partition just at the moment as
it is on the production box, but looking at the logs from the last
time I booted it, I can see the usual things for my PVR-500 card, so
the PVR-500 seems to be supported.  I would be very surprised if it
was supported and the PVR-150 was not.

So, other than it not working in MythTV, what causes you to think the
PVR-150 is not supported?  Do you see the /dev/video0, /dev/video24
and /dev/video32 devices for the PVR-150?  Is /dev/radio0 there
(presuming your PVR-150 has the FM radio option)?

How are you setting up your 0.25 system?  Is it an upgrade of your
existing boot partition, or a new install?  If it is a new install, it
may not have the necessary firmware files installed in /lib/firmware.
It is so long ago that I set up my PVR-500 that I do not remember the
file names, but they should be able to be found on a web search, or
may be listed in messages in your boot logs (/var/log/dmesg,
/var/log/kern.log, and dmesg command output).  You could also compare
the working /lib/firmware directory against the not working one to see
what may be missing.



As to alternatives for recording Sky, there are no other easy ones
that I know of.  There are very few analogue cards with S-Video inputs
and hardware MPEG encoding like the PVR-150 and PVR-500.  I do not
know of any USB ones, and virtually all analogue hardware is out of
production now anyway.  If your CPU is fast enough, it may be able to
do the MPEG encoding from raw video using an analogue card without a
hardware MPEG encoder.  But that is a fraught process as the CPU must
not be switched away from the encoding job for very long or you start
to lose blocks of frames from the recording.  I think my new
motherboard could do the job, as it has a 3.2 GHz quad core processor
and 8 Gibytes of RAM, so it could just dedicate a core to the job. But
I would want to experiment carefully to make sure that there were no
lost frames happening.

Or you could install a card reader in your MythTV box for your Sky
card, or use box like my Openbox S10 satellite receiver to hold the
Sky card and act as a card server:

  http://www.yhdigital.co.nz/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=36

You can then put a DVB-S2 card in your MythTV box and use sasc-ng to
get keys from the Sky card and decode the Sky channels so that they
can be recorded much as normal DVB-S and DVB-S2 satellite channels
can.  This allows full digital recordings of Sky, like the MySky boxes
do, including HD recordings.  I have this working on an experimental
basis.  The problem with this setup is that the Sky card seems to need
to be in a real Sky decoder for a few hours once a month or so for its
internal keys to be updated.  But I have not got to that point yet as
my experiments with this have only been for a few hours at a time.

Take a look at this page (Italian):

  http://forum.ubuntu-it.org/viewtopic.php?t=460152

and its Google translation from Italian:


http://translate.google.co.nz/translate?sl=it&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fforum.ubuntu-it.org%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ft%3D460152

for how to set this up.  I have it working using a TBS 5922 DVB-S2 USB
receiver:

  http://www.tbsdtv.com/products/tbs5922-dvb-s2-tv-tuner-usb.html

which I bought from:

  http://www.buydvb.net

I recommend using this for sasc-ng, as it comes with full Linux driver
support, done by compiling drivers they provide from source code. That
allows me to do the necessary patches for sasc-ng support in the TBS
driver compile process, rather than having to build a complete custom
kernel.

It is possible with sasc-ng to have multiple DVB-S/DVB-S2 cards in
multiple boxes all using the one card server and one Sky card, so you
can record multiple Sky channels at once.