My box is Debian Lenny. When I installed a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 card in a PCIe slot X-Windows failed to start with an error message: Type1 module not found. I removed the card and X-Windows starts normally.

Any suggestions?

Installed the board in a Debian Squeeze box. No conflict with X-Windows but no way to use the card. Tried to run setup.exe from the cd using wine but this failed. The card does show up when I run lspci so it is active.

Still need help

You won't want to install the (Windows) software that came with the card. In Linux, the preferred DVR software is MythTV. It can be a little challenging for a first-timer to get set up, though.

Start by going to debian-multimedia.org and follow the instructions for adding their repository to your sources.list, and installing their signing keys. Then, using package management frontend of choice (apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, etc.) install mythtv.

Run mythtv-setup. Step one is adding the DVB tuner to MythTV. Go to capture cards, select new card, card type is DVB, and select your card (there should be only one choice).

Step 2, add a video source. Give it a name. In your case, you can just call it Comcast or whatever you want. For the listings grabber, eventually you'll want a SchedulesDirect account, but for now leave it set to No Grabber.

Step 3, input connections. This associates your capture card with the "Comcast" video source you created in step 2.

Step 4, scan for channels!

Step 5, start the backend with "/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start"

Step 6, run the mythtv-frontend and try watching some TV!

I'm sure you'll have questions along the way, so feel free to ask!

-- Kevin

EDIT: I forgot to mention, on page two of the General setup in mythtv-setup, there's an option for which channel frequency table to use. I believe it comes set to us-bcast. You should change that to us-cable, us-cable-hrc, or us-cable-irc (whichever one gives you the best channel scan results)

Installed mythty but mythtv-setup was totally different than your descriptiom. I captured the error output but can't find a way to attach it here.

Make sure mysql-server is installed, and run "dpkg-reconfigure mythtv-database". You probably didn't have mysql-server installed before installing mythtv.

EDIT: changed mysql to mysql-server

You can use the program Kaffeine to watch TV with this card. The setup is less complex than for MythTV. You could also use mplayer, through terminal commands, but first you need to create a channels.conf file.

More info on this card and Linux, can be found here:

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-1250

Stuck in the DVB setting. For card type selected DVB DTV Capture Card. The next entry field "DVB Device Number:" will not accept any entry and a message just below it reads "Could not get card info for card #0 Subtype: Ur". If I click on Finish the program returns to the starting page for card entry. Can only escape the loop by using xkill.

Note: lspci -vmm output:

Slot: 04:00:0
Class: Multimedia Video Contoller
Vendor: Conexant Systems, Inc.
Device: Device 8880
SVendor: Hauppauge Computer Works, Inc.
SDevice: Device 2211
Rev: 04

I've used these cards in several systems. Only problem I ran into was with a first gen gigabyte AM2 MB. It would lose signal and lock up every time after about 20 minutes. It works flawlessly in other boards so I suspect it was a problem with the PCIe in the MB. To your problem. Have you loaded the driver (cx23885) software. I don't know what version Debian Lenny is. If it's an older version, I suspect you may need to upgrade the cx23885 driver for it. It should work fine with Mythbuntu 9.04. I had to upgrade the cx23885 driver to an Aug 1 2009 build to get a rev 04 Fusion HDTV7 Dual Express card to work, so if you have a newer version of the card that could be the problem. This might help you.

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-1250

Here's my ouput;

Slot: 04:00.0
Class: Multimedia video controller
Vendor: Conexant Systems, Inc.
Device: CX23885 PCI Video and Audio Decoder
SVendor: Hauppauge computer works Inc.
SDevice: Device 7911
Rev: 03

So it appears you have a different hvr-1250.

Here's the lspci output for my HVR-1250:

Slot: 03:00.0
Class: Multimedia video controller
Vendor: Conexant
Device: Device 8852
SVendor: Hauppauge computer works Inc.
SDevice: Device 7911
Rev: 02

It seems wnewell and I have older revisions of the hvr-1250. It seems possible you need the latest driver to recognize the latest revision of the hardware. What kernel version are you using?

What does lsmod|grep cx23885 yield? If nothing, does modprobe cx23885 give any useful messages?

Looking at the invoice I see I have purchased WinTV HVR-1250 Model 1196. I had not realized there were different models. What should I have bought?

I did run lspci -k which reported kernel driver in use cx23885. The box in Debian Squeeze (Testing) with kernel 2.6.30-1-amd64.

A little Googling has revealed that you do indeed need to download and build the latest driver for that card. See here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1234274

Tried to install latest driver as per previous post. The make instruction fails with some permission denied messages. It's not obvious why and the directories and files have read and execute (555) permissions. Tried changing those cited in the permission denied messages to 777 but had no effect. Ownership is root:root and I issued the make command as root.

Are you getting the errors during "make" or "make install"? Also, can you copy/paste the output?

I just tried it on my system, and it builds and installs fine. However, I used slightly different steps than given in the post above. I don't like building things as root under /usr/src, I prefer to build as my own user in my home directory. So this is what I did:


kevin@htpc:~$ sudo aptitude install mercurial
kevin@htpc:~$ hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb
kevin@htpc:~$ cd v4l-dvb
kevin@htpc:~/v4l-dvb$ make
kevin@htpc:~/v4l-dvb$ sudo make install


I didn't install build-essentials or linux-headers because I already had them installed.

Here is the output attached as trial.txt

Do you have perl installed?

perl 5.10.0-25 is installed.

Logging out to go sailboat racing, better than TV anyway. Back at it tomorrow.

It may be that you don't have the Run bit set on these scripts. Or maybe there's a perl dependency that's not installed. Check the ReadMe or Install files?

BTW, for any apps you compile (except kernel) the Debian place to do this is in /usr/local/src/.

Successfully installed the new cx23885 driver.

Still trapped in a loop when setting the dvb capture card. Now when I select CVB DTV Capture Card (v3.x) the following entries are:

DVB Device Number: 0
Frontend ID: LGDT 3305 Subtype: ATSC
Signal Timeout (msec): 500
Tuning Timeout (msec): 3000
DiSEqC Recording Options

I cannot change the device number, the frontend info is filled in automatically, the timings can be changed, the last line is two entries neither of which can be changed though tabbing scrolls through them.

When I click on Finish the setup loops back the start of dvb card selection and I can only escape the loop with xkill.

(FWIMC: Preceeding problem was missing kernel headers. I used to roll my own kernels and never gave a thought to headers. This box started with a Debian kernel image.)

Successfully installed the new cx23885 driver.

Still trapped in a loop when setting the dvb capture card. Now when I select CVB DTV Capture Card (v3.x) the following entries are:

DVB Device Number: 0
Frontend ID: LGDT 3305 Subtype: ATSC
Signal Timeout (msec): 500
Tuning Timeout (msec): 3000
DiSEqC Recording Options

I cannot change the device number, the frontend info is filled in automatically, the timings can be changed, the last line is two entries neither of which can be changed though tabbing scrolls through them.

When I click on Finish the setup loops back the start of dvb card selection and I can only escape the loop with xkill.

(FWIMC: Preceeding problem was missing kernel headers. I used to roll my own kernels and never gave a thought to headers. This box started with a Debian kernel image.)

I guess I don't understand the problem. Everything looks good to me. However, you should be able to go into Recording options (highlight and press Enter) and set that section up. I just set the card for on demand use and change the tuner options from 2 to 1 per card. How you set that would depend on if you have a station that broadcast more than 1 sub channel that you might want to record at the same time. The Device number 0 is set during boot and can't be changed. It's just telling you the number. Signal Timeout of 500 doesn't look right though. Once you select finish, it should go back to the to start of card selection and you should see the card that you added there as DVB 0 iirc. Just escape out of that and setup the rest.

When you hit Finish it should bring you back to the card selection screen, which will list your current card, and have the option to add a new card. If you hit Escape at this screen, it should take you back to the main menu. Does that not work?

Trying to scan channels I have hit a glitch. Working through the Mythtv documention I got to scan channels and set the frequency table to Cable High and modulation to QAM-256. Scanning started at channel 78-no signal and continued to at least channel 132 all with no signal though occasionally the signal strength would leap briefly from 29% to near 90%. At about channel 132 the program scanned rapidly through further channels and locked up. I am attaching the std error output.

The tuner card is connected to the Comcast settop box.

Finish/Esc does work. The combination was not obvious to me.

The tuner card is connected to the Comcast settop box.

The cable from the wall needs to be plugged into the tuner card. If you plug the tuner into the STB, you'll only receive what the STB is outputting on channel 3 or 4, which is whatever channel it is currently tuned to.

I naively assumed that if the tuner in my television set can derive all the channels from what comes out of the settop box a tv tuner card should be able to do the same. I gather that for some reason this is not the case. I will connect directly to the cable.

To conclude this subject can you enlighten me as to the purpose of the digital transport boxes with Comcast has sent to be used in connecting TV's in addition to those connected to settop boxes?

The PC tuner can derive everything your TV can. Your Tv isn't deriving anything if it's source is the STB. The tuner in the STB is controlling the channel selection and outputting video, not channels. Never heard of the transport boxes, but then again I've never actually used anything except broadcast TV. You do realize that your card under Linux, can only receive ATSC ( broadcast 8VSB) and QAM (which is a part of the ATSC spec). Analog is not supported for the HVR-1250, So it will work fine with ATSC broadcast, and cable clear QAM, but you won't be able plug a cable from the STB into the HVR-1250 and get anything.
What are you trying to get?

Those digital converter boxen that Crumcast is sending out are to decrypt/decode and decompress the pure digital signal that they are converting over to. Very soon there will be no more analog signal, so don't bother.

There is a kit (http://www.nextcomwireless.com/R5000/home.htm) that can be installed in many boxes which will tap into the guts of the box and suck out the pure decrypted transport stream like a vampire. I've had one in my Dish HD box for years, and it works great with Myth as long as you're willing to patch and compile. I don't know if it'll work in any Crumcast digital box.

The R5000HD only supports satellite STB's. Your best bet for getting all of your cable channels is the HD-PVR.

What I am/was trying to do was turn my computer into a HDTV set and connect it the Crumcast (I like that one) cable which is about to go all HDTV. I have a 23" LCD monitor and were I to buy an LCD HDTV the largest that would fit in my TV cabinet is a 27" model. Not much difference?

I have gotten somewhat further with the current setup. With the tuner connected directly to cable the scan captures a number of channels but still crashes when about 60% complete. I assumed that some channel information might have been stored so I proceeded through the rest of the instructions. Everything seemed to be working until I clicked on Watch TV. The screen went momentarily blank and then returned to the menu page.

I'll back up and try some different scan settings.

The R5000HD only supports satellite STB's. Your best bet for getting all of your cable channels is the HD-PVR.
http://www.nextcomwireless.com/R5000/info.htm#Cable


vanderdyken, IMHO a 27" is not really a 'TV', but then I'm jaded. Don't even bother with analog cable. No use.

Channel scanning seems to be broken in recent builds of MythTV.

Try Kaffeine instead.

Or, you can try running a scan from the command line, followed by running mplayer to watch a channel. To scan from the command line:

$ sudo apt-get install dvb-apps mplayer

$ mkdir ~/.mplayer (if it doesn't already exist)

$ scan /usr/share/dvb/atsc/us-Cable-Standard-center-frequencies-QAM256 > ~/.mplayer/channels.conf
or
$ scan /usr/share/dvb/atsc/us-Cable-HRC-center-frequencies-QAM256 > ~/.mplayer/channels.conf
or
$ scan /usr/share/dvb/atsc/us-Cable-IRC-center-frequencies-QAM256 > ~/.mplayer/channels.conf

$ mplayer dvb://channelname

Replace channelname with one from the generated channels.conf file. Enclose in quotes if it has a space.

-- Kevin

I tried this approach experimenting with various parts of the channel id without success. I am attaching the output of scan /usr/share/dvb/atsc/us-Cable-Standard-center-frequencies-QAM256 > ~/.mplayer/channels.conf. What do I do with this?

What I am/was trying to do was turn my computer into a HDTV set and connect it the Crumcast (I like that one) cable which is about to go all HDTV.

Here's your problem. The HVR-1250 (or any atsc/qam tuner) can only receive the unencrypted signal (clear QAM) from the cable co. Normally, these are just the local broadcast channels, and maybe not all of them. It can't any of the other channels like hbo, espn, etc. unless your cable co. decides to not encrypt them (fat chance). So if you are planning on getting the encrypted channels form them you are spinning your wheels for nothing. It ain't going to happen any time soon.


I have gotten somewhat further with the current setup. With the tuner connected directly to cable the scan captures a number of channels but still crashes when about 60% complete. I assumed that some channel information might have been stored so I proceeded through the rest of the instructions. Everything seemed to be working until I clicked on Watch TV. The screen went momentarily blank and then returned to the menu page.

This sounds like you don't have the database server address correct. First page of general setup iirc. And you might want to check that the backend hostname matches. I've seen this several times and it always (IIRC) a database addressing problem.

Here's your problem. ...
I tried to tell him, but he wants to do this anyway for some reason.


This sounds like you don't have the database server address correct. First page of general setup iirc. And you might want to check that the backend hostname matches. I've seen this several times and it always (IIRC) a database addressing problem.
I don't know... if it were database address he'd see earlier symptoms much worse. But worth a check.

Double checked the server entries, they match the entries in /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt.

The attached script shows failed to get pageinfo when I tried to watch tv.

Check the directory you have set for recording live TV. Is it writable by Myth? and your user? Are there any files in it? (even zero-length)

When you set a program to record... does it?

What driver do you have set for your card? Was it auto-recognized by Myth?

Oh, and your Myth version is way too old. What distro are you using? Consider Debian Testing, or ask here for SVN compile instructions.

Ok, It works - jerky but it works.

The last hurdle was the storage. I had made the directories readable and writeable (666). When I made them executable as well (777) play video worked.

Ok, It works - jerky but it works.

If you have a recent NVIDIA card, GeForce 8 or 9 series, you can use VDPAU to enable hardware-acceleration of video playback. If you have an older NVIDIA card, and most Intel integrated graphic chips, and possibly some ATI cards (not entirely sure about ATI), you can use XvMC extensions to partially accelerate MPEG2 playback (digital cable is usually MPEG2, I don't know if any have switched to MPEG4 yet).

Try changing your playback profile to "Slim" or "CPU--". To change it, in mythfrontend, go to Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback, then go to the third page, and try the different video playback profiles.

CPU-- attempts to use XvMC, but your video driver may not support it. If it does, you should see a good improvement in playback performance.

If you have an NVIDIA 8 or 9 series graphics card, then VDPAU is the way to go. But that will require more work.

Hope this helps!
-- Kevin

If you use XvMC, make sure you follow the instuction on the MythTV wiki:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/XvMC

And if you are using an AGP card, there is an easily missed setting that is needed:
Note that since driver version 100.14.11 there is a bug for users of AGP cards in the nvidia driver that requires the NVAGP option set to 0 (turning off agpgart support).

I tore my hair out trying to get XvMC to work, until I noticed that statement. It basically means adding an option to the Section "Device" section
Option "NVAGP" "0"

Good for you vanderdyken. The executable bit for a directory really means 'it's OK to enter'. You really should have permissions set to 770 and owner {user}:mythtv.

Please respond to my distro question.

My system is Debian Squeeze (testing) and dpkg -p myth shows version: 0.21.svn20080704-0.0. Apt-get thinks this is the latest version.

Tried changing to C--, Play TV no longer worked.
Tried changing to slim, Play TV no longer worked.
Tried each of the other options in turn, Play TV no longer worked.

When I click on Play TV the screen goes momentarily blue then returns to the menu.

Everything was working pretty well last night, programs ran smoothly except for an occasion jump or blur. I don't belive I have changed anything else.

You may need to tweak the Profile settings, depending on your system. I have gotten the best results by spliting the Profile into the three major resolutions. I make a new profile called "HDTV", with these three settings:

#1) Page One
Match Criteria: <= W: 720 H: 480
Match Criteria: > W: 0 H: 0
Decoder: Standard
Video Renderer: xv-blitz OSD Renderer: chromakey x OSD Fade

Page two
Primary Deinterlacer: None
Fallback Deinterlacer: None

===========================================
#2) Page One
Match Criteria: <= W: 1280 H: 720
Match Criteria: > W: 720 H: 480
Decoder: Standard XvMC
Video Renderer: xvmc-opengl OSD Renderer: opengl x OSD Fade

Page two
Primary Deinterlacer: Bob (2x)
Fallback Deinterlacer: None

===========================================
#3) Page One
Match Criteria: <= W: 1920 H: 1080
Match Criteria: > W: 1280 H: 720
Decoder: Standard XvMC
Video Renderer: xvmc-opengl OSD Renderer: opengl x OSD Fade

Page two
Primary Deinterlacer: Bob (2x)
Fallback Deinterlacer: None

===========================================

I hope this helps you out some. I also ended up doing the same for my new VDPAU system. I found that the two HD resolutions needed different deinterlacing settings.

My system is Debian Squeeze (testing) and dpkg -p myth shows version: 0.21.svn20080704-0.0. Apt-get thinks this is the latest version.

That doesn't match any of the three available versions at debian-multimedia.

Stable: 0.21.svn20080706-0.0
Testing: 0.21.svn20090704-0.0
Unstable: 0.21.svn20090824-0.0

I recommend using the one from testing or newer.

When I click on Play TV the screen goes momentarily blue then returns to the menu.

Check the frontend and backend logs in /var/log/mythtv for clues to why playback is failing.

The trial.txt file you posted earlier says this:
mythfrontend version: 0.21.20080304-1 www.mythtv.org

You may need to tweak the Profile settings, depending on your system. I have gotten the best results by spliting the Profile into the three major resolutions. I make a new profile called "HDTV", with these three settings:

#1) Page One
Match Criteria: <= W: 720 H: 480
Match Criteria: > W: 0 H: 0
Decoder: Standard
Video Renderer: xv-blitz OSD Renderer: chromakey x OSD Fade

Page two
Primary Deinterlacer: None
Fallback Deinterlacer: None


No deinterlacer for 480i?

First the typo: The installed version of mythtv is 20090704-0.0

Next: Can't play TV, haven't changed any thing is not correct. I ran an apt-get dist-upgrade which installed a new kernel-image-1.6.30-1-amd64 which did not take effect until I rebooted the computer which was shut down overnight. This overwrote the updated version of cx23885 and removed /dev/dvb. I have reinstalled the updated version and can now play TV.

Finally, the mythtv frontend version of video playback version is different from the one described in a previous post. For each choice there are a series of if statements depending on display settings and the sequence in which they are tested can be modified. For CPU-- one choice is if rez > 0 0 -> XvMC. It does not work well on the one channel I have tested. For Slim two of the choices are if rez > 0 0 -> ffmpeg & XVideo and if rez > 0 0 -> ffmpeg & quartz. There are other choices depending on specfic display sizes. I will experiment.

Glad you're up and running again.

What video card or chip do you have? Knowing that will allow us to give you the options available to you for hardware accelerated video playback (if any). Also, what CPU?

video card: GeForce 7600 GT
CPU: Athlon 64 Processor 3800+

If you install the nvidia-kernel-2.6.26-2-amd64 and nvidia-glx packages from "non-free", you should get XvMC acceleration.

Then change the driver in your xorg.conf file to use "nvidia" instead of "nv".

Note that you'll have to boot with the 2.6.26-2 kernel, since they don't yet have a kernel module in the repositories for the 2.6.30 kernel yet.

Thanks Ken, I'll give this a try but first I must catch up on some other work.

No deinterlacer for 480i?
It seems to play just fine without one. Which one do you think that I should be using? I'll give it a try.

To use XvMC in MythTV, you need to follow the instructions in the MythTV-XvMC Wiki Section (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/XvMC) that I posted about earlier. It is very important to do this, in case you missed it:

Enabling the chipset library

Each chipset provides an interface between the XvMC library and the actual driver. This is usually handled by what is called the XvMCW wrapper library. The XVMCW library looks to a text configuration file in order to find the correct XvMC library. XvMC will not be enabled if the XvMCConfig file refers to the XvMCW library. The wrapper configuration file is found at /etc/X11/XvMCConfig and you either may have to create this file yourself as it is sometimes not pre-installed even though it is needed, or edit it to remove the libXvMCW.so reference and replace it with the proper reference.
This file contains a single line consisting of the driver library name:

NVIDIA
libXvMCNVIDIA_dynamic.so.1

All these questions about deinterlacers. A while back I posted a guide on how to objectively test how fast your card can deinterlace, and thus how to select the best one to match and have Myth test the video for characteristics to match. It's here somewhere...