carcass

I'll try to describe this as briefly as possible. I had run 2007 32 bit since 2007 came out on one machine. The motherboard kicked it and so I upgraded to a new motherboard/processor/etc. I also bought a new SATA hard disk. New Equipment: Gigabyte GA M61VME-S2 motherboard AMD Athlon X2-64 processor. Some Hitachi SATA drive (Since then have also added a new Seagate SATA disk) When I swapped in the new mobo, etc., the system booted no problem. I decided to reinstall the 64 bit version onto the SATA disk. Started up, installed fine. Everything's good. Except now, when I boot the machine with the SATA disk(s) connected, 2007 does not find anything on the IDE bus. No HDD, no CD, no DVD, nothing. Looking in /dev/ the special devices aren't even there (no /dev/hdxx). I can disconnect everything from the SATA bus and then 64-bit 2007 sees the IDE bus again. One interesting twist is if I boot up with the install DVD (from the IDE bus) and go into "rescue" mode, I can see everything. I can only assume at this point there is something with the 64 bit system that's not quitre right. Can anyone offer me any tips on this? Thanks!

OK, so it's been a while but I got my tuner working, and freevo installed. What finally worked for me: kernel: 2.6.11-6mdk ivtv: 0.3.2p It will run all night with no problem. One thing I did notice however is that the longer it runs, the longer the delay between tuning a new channel and seeing the new channel. I suspect this is because I am using a software decoder and it's just not keeping up with the stream and hence mplayer is buffering a lot. I had some problems that may be related to the NVIDIA kernel module, but I can't trace them to ground. It may not be NVIDIA at all. It still doesn't work with kdetv, xawtv, or tvtime, but I don't care, because I can watch TV using 'mplayer /dev/video'. Unfortunately, I cannot get mplayer tv:// to work at all. I get a green screen. mplayer complains about not being able to do teh ioctl operation and then exits. Xine does not work in this capacity either. Hence, I'm still unable to use freevo to watch or record TV. Can anyone point me to a good resource on getting mplayer or xine to tune tv channels? I am also interested in finding a good way to get mplayer or xine to interface with my NVIDIA hardware MPEG-2 decoder. Also some resources on using the NVIDIA tv-out that I have...I destroyed my X setup a week ago trying to make it work and it took a couple of days to get back to life. If anyone has any questions about my setup or how I made the tuner work so far, please ask; I'm grateful for the help I've received here so far and am glad to help others out.

OK-- so here's what's going on: I got sick of playing with Mandrake 10.1 so I downloaded the (very recently available) 10.2rc1 and did a clean install on the machine of interest. Amazingly enough, the stock ivtv (ivtv-0.2.0-rc3f) that comes with 10.2rc1 will allow video capture from the tuner. The distribution does not include the firmware, so that must be installed. Unfortunately, audio doesn't work, and so far, kdetv and xawtv can't open the tuner device (/dev/vbi). There appears to be some sort of permission problem, although it happens with the root user. for example, kdetv gives the error: scantv gives: Unfortunately, when I do 'mplayer /dev/video', it will run for a random length of time and then hard lock the machine. So I uninstalled the rc3f ivtv and went out and got ivtv-0.2.0-rc3i (latest release). When I built and installed it, I got audio along with my video!! :) The machine still locks after a random time of playing :( But, when I do 'cat /dev/video > somefile.mpg', It will run indefinitely, creating a file that I can then watch with mplayer. This file does not appear to be MPEG compressed, as 5 minutes of video and audio came out to about 450 MB. So, I'm way better off than I was before except for the following problems: /dev/vbi cannot be connected to by tuner programs for some reason the system locks up when viewing the /dev/video device directly with mplayer Perhaps other problems that I haven't encountered yet. I can't use freevo to test because the 10.2rc1 has a badly broken freevo installation (many perl modules are missing) 10.1 had this issue as well. Any insights on my new problems? Thanks for your help so far!

OK, so last night I tried out two different kernels: the 2.6.8.1-24mdk that ships with Mandrake 10.1 as an alternate, and 2.6.11.3 from kernel.org. Ivtv gave the same errors with -24mdk as with the -12mdk kernel. After installing 2.6.11.3, I lost the ability to use X11; not sure why. When I reverted to 2.6.8.1-12mdk, I got X11 back, but no love on ivtv. Next round this evening.

OK, so I haven't tested a vanilla kernel yet but I did do the following: Installed the PVR-250 in another machine in which I have dual-boot win2000 and Mandrake 10.1. I installed the windows drivers and software and the card works perfectly there. So it's not the card hardware. then I performed a scratch install of the ivtv suite on the Mandrake part of that machine, and voila: same problems as my other machine, same exact behavior. so it's not a hardware combination problem. Hence it must be in the drivers or the kernel. I will now move the card back to the original machine and try working with other kernels. I will update this thread as I go so that everybody can benefit from my blundering... :)

I'll try it when I get home.

Interesting...the patch has already been applied by Mandrake, it seems. When I tried to do the patch last night, patch returned an error saying it detected an already-applied patch or a reverse patch. I will try to see whether the code has actually been patched. However, note that my tuner is marked TAPC, and the driver detects a type 39 tuner.

Try using Mandrake's graphical interface to urmpi. You can get to it through drakconf, under "software." Go to the "install software" part, and type "kernel" in the search box. That should return a list of all available kernel-related items that you don't already have installed. Look for the exact kernel source that you want, and check it off and install it. Then go to the software removal part and serach for "kernel" again. Remove any kernel sources that aren't what you want.

Thanks for the reply. When I do "cat /dev/video0" or "mplayer /dev/video0" I don't get any errors, and no snow, but the machine will usually lock up after about 30 seconds. Usually MPlayer will report that it's buffer is filling. Once it gets to about 19.6% -19.9%, the mplayer process will lock up, sometimes resulting in a hard lock of the machine. Last night I was able to fool kdetv into tuning in channels by doing the following: unload all ivtv-related drivers start kdetv modprobe ivtv start kdetv's channel wizard When I did that, kdetv searched the range of channels (us-cable) and actually found a name for Channel 2 (ABC, which happens to be wrong for my cable provider. ABC is channel 4 here, channel 2 is CBS). It made it the whole way through the channel range. I was able to change from channel to channel, but none of them actually showed any video. The "devices" tab in kdetv only shows the NVIDIA device when I do it this way. So it appears that I can get the tuner to work (sort of), but the video device is not working properly. I did build the utils and played around with ivtvctl a bit, but it didn't seem to help. I was able to select video sources, and print out information about the card, but nothing struck me as odd or erroneous. Thanks again!

Please note I answered my own question with regard to firmware extraction by finding the following link: http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php?page...tingTheFirmware I figured I'd post it here for the general use of the group. However, once I extracted my firmware and rebuilt the module, I still have the same problems as before....

Hi, folks, So far this thread has been very helpful. However, I have yet to get my tuner working. I just got the tuner card this week, but it appears to have one of the older tuners. The tuner is ink-stamped "TAPC" on the side (there are other version numbers that I didn't write down yet). It is a WinTV PVR-250 with what appears to be a type 39 tuner (the module detects this type). I have a clean install of Mandrake 10.1 installed, with kernel 2.6.8.1-12mdk as it came off the CD. I cleared the ivtv drivers that came with 10.1 out and have built the drivers from scratch for several different versions. Here's what's happening: I've followed the instructions in this thread and at Chris Kennedy's site. I get the driver installed OK, and I can (sometimes--there appear to be no reproducible circumstances) get output from /dev/video0, but sometimes not. My system video card is an ASUS Geforce 3 card that happens to have a video capture device on board--I can get kdetv to display the output of a video camera attached to the nvidia card's capture port. This capture port shows up in kdetv as "NVIDIA Video Interface Port - XVideo Port 204" In kdetv, if I attempt to change the device from the nvidia capture device to the PVR-250, kdetv locks up. If I attempt to run the kdetv channel wizard, kdetv locks up. Xawtv is unable to scan any channels... and tvtime can't find /dev/video0, but that appears to be a more general problem. I have tried several versions of the ivtv drivers including: ivtv-0.2.0-rc1 ivtv-0.2.0-rc3g ivtv-0.2.0-rc3h ivtv-0.3.1n ivtv-0.3.2i I get the same result with each version. At one point, I installed an old BT-848 card (this card does NOT have a tuner in it) in the machine at the same time as the PVR-250. When it was installed, I twice succeeded in getting kdetv to find some channels, but both times the entire machine locked up solid before the channel seek was complete. Thinking this might have something to do with the firmware, I attempted to use the ivtvfwextract.pl utility to extract the firmware from my Windows driver CD, but I can't seem to get the utility to do anything (it keeps complaining: "./ivtvfwextract.pl: Can't open /root/tmp/ivtvex.10334/hcwpvrp2.sys: No such file or directory" I'm not a Perl coder so I haven't tried to dig too deeply into this). So I'm stuck using the firmware distributed by Thac. In addition, sometimes I am able to get mplayer to show "snow" from the /dev/video0 devide but if I leave it running for too long, the machine locks up hard. Can anyone offer some advice? Thanks!! Below is the output from my module startup (with version 0.3.2i) which looks fine to me: Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: ==================== START INIT IVTV ==================== Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: version 0.3.2 (i) loading Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: Linux version: 2.6.8.1-12mdk 686 gcc-3.4 Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: In case of problems please include the debug info Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: between the START INIT IVTV and END INIT IVTV lines when Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: mailing the ivtv-devel mailinglist. Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: Autodetected WinTV PVR 250 card Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: Found an iTVC16 based chip Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 0000:00:0c.0 Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: VIA PCI device: 0x0391 vendor: 0x1106 Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: tveeprom: Ignoring new-style parameters in presence of obsolete ones Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: tveeprom: Hauppauge: model = 32062, rev = C182, serial# = 7812186 Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: tveeprom: tuner = LG TAPC H791F (idx = 82, type = 39) Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: tveeprom: tuner fmt = NTSC(M) (eeprom = 0x08, v4l2 = 0x00001000) Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: tveeprom: audio_processor = MSP3445 (type = 12) Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: i2c attach [client=tveeprom[0],ok] Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: Tuner Type 39, Tuner formats 0x00001000, Radio: yes, Model 0x008d1612, Revision 0x00000000 Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: NTSC tuner detected Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: Radio detected Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: tuner: chip found at addr 0xc2 i2c-bus ivtv i2c driver #0 Mar 13 23:06:16 moraine kernel: ivtv: i2c attach [client=(tuner unset),ok] Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: saa7115: Ignoring new-style parameters in presence of obsolete ones Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: saa7115: starting probe for adapter ivtv i2c driver #0 (0x10005) Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: saa7115: detecting saa7115 client on address 0x42 Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: saa7115: writing init values Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: ivtv: i2c attach [client=saa7115[0],ok] Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: saa7115: status: (1E) 0x81, (1F) 0xb1 Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: msp34xx: init: chip=MSP3445G-B8 +nicam +simple +radio Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: ivtv: i2c attach [client=MSP3445G-B8,ok] Mar 13 23:06:17 moraine kernel: msp3410: daemon started Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Encoder revision: 0x02040024 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Encoder Firmware may be buggy, use version 0x02040011Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Configuring WinTV PVR 250 card with 5 streams Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Create DMA stream 0 using 1024 16384 byte buffers 16777216 kbytes total Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, streamtype 0 minor 0 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Create DMA stream 1 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, streamtype 1 minor 32 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Create stream 2 using 40 52224 byte buffers 2097152 kbytes total Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, streamtype 2 minor 224 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Create DMA stream 3 using 455 4608 byte buffers 2097152 kbytes total Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, streamtype 3 minor 24 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Create stream 4 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Registered v4l2 device, streamtype 4 minor 64 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Setting Tuner 39 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: tuner: type set to 39 (LG NTSC (newer TAPC series)) by ivtv i2c driver #0 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: saa7115: decoder set input (4) Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: saa7115: now setting Composite input Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Setting audio matrix to input 3, output 1 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Switching standard to NTSC. Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: saa7115: decoder set norm NTSC Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: saa7115: set audio: 0x01 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: Initialized WinTV PVR 250, card #0 Mar 13 23:06:18 moraine kernel: ivtv: ==================== END INIT IVTV ====================