[mythtvnz] LIRC and mySKY / Pace TDS850NNZ

Fri Oct 13 11:15:35 BST 2017

On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 20:17:31 +1300, you wrote:

>> On 29/09/2017, at 00:13, Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>> 
>> Sounds good.  And the TBS6909 only needs a single aerial feed for all
>> 8 tuners, so it should be getting even better signal than the old
>> SkyStar2 cards, which presumably needed a splitter.
>> 
>>> Thanks for pointers and kick in the ass to get this moving.  8)
>> 
>> Let me know if you need any help with setup.
>
>Right, quick update.
>
>Card arrived today.  Just wasted the afternoon to try and get it going.  In the process I lost access to most of my existing inputs (SkyStar 2, HD PVR).  Card physically installed fine, installed the TBS software following instructions from https://www.tbsdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=86&t=9960 (Open Source, git and make, and install firmware) and could see the card with lspci -vvv  but it didnt appear in dmesg.  Same applied to the SkyStar 2 (x2), plus there were no entries for /dev/dvb/* or /dev/video0.  After much gnashing of teeth, reboots and googling to many dead ends, I ended up trying modprobe to load the SkyStar cards.  That was failing with messages like:
>
># sudo modprobe b2c2_flexcop_pci
>modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'b2c2_flexcop_pci': Required key not available
>
>which eventually lead me to info about disabling Secure Boot in BIOS/EFI settings (never heard of it til now).  This is a fairly recent Asus Z170 motherboard so the setting was Boot > Secure Boot > OS Type and set it to Other OS.  Now dmesg is showing entries for TurboSight TBS 6909 DVB-S/S2 & Sky2PC/SkyStar 2 DVB-S, and there are adaptors listed in /dev/dvb/.  8)
>
>To test the card was working, I added a single new card input to MythTV Setup using the same settings as the other DVB cards (and left the others as they were).  Watch Live TV starts with one of the SkyStar cards fine (showing signal strength info when first starting) but when I try to access the new card via  Menu > Source > Switch Input it just freezes for a bit and dumps me out to the menu.  Switching to any of the other inputs works as expected.  Ive tried switching the aerial input to each of the 4 input connectors on the card, and also tried using the cable connected to the SkyStar card (just to eliminate bad cable or wrong port).  
>
>Myth is currently back online and can record from the SkyStars, and HDPVR so Ive deleted this new card input, and will look at it again tomorrow.
>
>
> - Wade

I did a patch to the TBS6009 drivers so that I could specify which
aerial input was used with each tuner pair.  That simplified getting
it working quite a bit.  But it should work with the default mode=0
option if you plug the dish into the correct input and make sure that
your setup in MythTV does not send the 22 kHz tone ever.  I have not
tried that since I started using my patch though - I just use the
patch and specify the input I am using with mode=1.

And there has been a recent change (end of September IIRC), so the
driver name for loading the TBS6909 RF side driver has changed from
mxl5xx to mxl58x.  That means that all the documentation that tells
you the driver name is mxl5xx is now wrong and you need to use mxl58x
instead.

The support page for the TBS6909 is here:

https://www.tbsiptv.com/index.php?route=product/download/drivers&path=13&id=16

and this is the site for the TBS open source drivers:

https://github.com/tbsdtv/linux_media/wiki

Note the instruction in FAQ 4 at the bottom of that page about getting
the firmware for the TBS6909.

I have put all the files I use for compiling and running the TBS open
source drivers on my web server:

http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/tbs6909/

The files are:

options-dvb.conf

This goes in /etc/modprobe.d to configure the drivers.  Adjust the
settings for where you want the tuners assigned.  The numbers I am
using are compatible with what MythTV had my old DVB-S2 and DVB-T
tuners assigned on, and I decided that it was easier to set the
numbers in the driver than to change the MythTV end of things.

All the remaining files are used to build the TBS drivers.  I have
them in /root/projects/tbs6909-drivers.  If you want to put them
anywhere else, you will need to edit that path in the script files.

mxl58x.patch

The patch file, if you want to use that.  This creates the inputs=
option for the mxl58x driver.  Use "modinfo mxl58x" to see how to use
it.

download_and_build.sh

This downloads and builds the standard (unpatched) TBS drivers, and
then installs them.

download_and_build_with_addons.sh

This downloads the TBS drivers, patches the mxl58x.c file, builds and
installs them.

upgrade-and-reinstall.sh

This should get the changes to the TBS drivers from git and build and
install them.  However, it does not work if you are using the patch so
I have not used it for a while and it is possible it is not now
working.

Note: There seems to be a race condition in building the TBS drivers,
so if you use the make -j option to do parallel making using all cores
of your CPU, it can stop in the middle with various errors, usually
about a missing file.  It does not always happen, and running the
script again may make it work the next time - or not.  So to get
reliable building, I have disabled that option in my scripts.  That
means it takes a *lot* longer to build, but I can just set it going
and go away and forget about it and it will build properly.  It does
mean that I need a much longer gap between recordings to do a kernel
upgrade though.

I have only just had my first kernel upgrade arrive since the mxl5xx
to mxl58x change happened, so I have not actually used the updated
build with that change yet.  I have got it to compile and install on
my test PC, but that does not have my TBS6909 card in it any more -
that is in the production box.  Which I hope will be getting the
upgrade in the next gap between recordings that is long enough, at
00:53 tonight.  I will let you know how it works out.

On my test PC, I now have my old TBS5922 DVB-S2 USB tuner installed,
and recent versions of the TBS open source drivers have broken this
tuner.  It looks like the problem is the i2c communications with its
frontend, as the result is that the /dev/dvb<x>/frontend0 device never
appears and there is an error message logged about it.  I have posted
an issue about this.