[mythtvnz] DVB drivers location and .zst compression

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 21 May 2025 10:54:09 +1200, you wrote:

>
>On 2025-05-21 10:41, Curtis Walker wrote:
>> On Wed, 21 May 2025 at 10:19, Paul <paulgir at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi
>>
>>     I have been seeing minor artifacts (pixellation) , mainly after
>>     skipping forward during playback.
>>
>>     Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-2200Back in my installation of MythTV on
>>     Xubuntu 16.04 I saw a similar effect because one piece of firmware
>>     (nxp7164-2010-03-10.1.fw) for
>>
>>     my Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-2200 was not in    /lib/firmware/'current
>>     kernal'  , so I was checking the locations of the relevant
>>     firmware and I see  /lib/firmware/'current kernal' no longer
>>
>>     exists.
>>
>>      The HVR-2200 drivers:   v4l-saa7164-1.0.2.fw      ;  
>>     v4l-saa7164-1.0.3.fw     ;     cp dvb-fe-tda10048-1.0.fw       and
>>      nxp7164-2010-03-10.1.fw    are currently all in
>>
>>     /lib/firmware.
>>
>>     The other thing I noticed is that all the firmware is Zstandard
>>     compressed and the 4 HVR-2200 files with .fw extensions are
>>     described in the Thunar file manager as "unknown".
>>
>>     Do I need to compress these files and convert them to .fw.zst
>>     extensions  like all the others or are these ok as is?
>>
>>     Regards
>>
>>
>> I may have missed it, but what distro are you currently using?
>
>Hi  , in recent weeks I went from 20.04 to 24.04 via 22.04 and to MythTV 
>version 35

I had a look at my /lib/firmware directory and it looks like the new
standard in Ubuntu 24.04 is to compress all the .fw files.  I have a
lot of .fw.zst files - it looks like most of the .fw files that are
coming from current 24.04 packages are zst compressed.  But in the
dmesg output, I can still see .fw files being loaded, so it is not
necessary to go around compressing your other .fw files.

Not all drivers report loading their firmware files, but it always
pays to check occasionally to see what is happening at boot time. Take
a look at the output of:

dmesg | grep "\.fw"

If it is a long time since the last boot, there may no longer be any
boot messages in the dmesg output, so if possible check soon after a
boot.

I have never actually heard of there being a /lib/firmware/'current
kernel' directory.  I have always put the firmware in /lib/firmware or
an appropriate subdirectory of /lib/firmware.