[mythtvnz] DVB drivers location and .zst compression

[Paul]

On 2025-05-21 13:55, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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/lib/firmware/'current kernel'   Probably dated back to 12.04 or 16.04 . I used to have to copy NXP7164_2010-03-10.1.fw to /lib/firmware/'current kernel'  after kernel updates , or I would get intermittent pixellation in recordings.
After 20.04 I no longer need to do that. That's probably when /lib/firmware/'current kernel' ceased to exist.

The output of dmesg | grep "\.fw" :

[    6.047781] saa7164_downloadfirmware() Waiting for firmware upload (NXP7164-2010-03-10.1.fw)
[   22.767075] tda10048_firmware_upload: waiting for firmware upload (dvb-fe-tda10048-1.0.fw)...
[   28.488814] tda10048_firmware_upload: waiting for firmware upload (dvb-fe-tda10048-1.0.fw)...

My system boots for recordings and then shuts down

I compressed the four firmware files to see if it makes any difference.