How to get the Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner and/or Pinnacle PCTV HD PCI card to work with Knoppmyth R5.5

New instructions

The following will enable the Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner or the Pinnacle PCTV HD PCI card to work with Knoppmyth R5.5. The only "gotcha" is that you will be building the latest V4L drivers directly from the V4L repository. On Sept 12, 2008, the repository conained a working driver. The subsequent updates may make it more or less stable.

Installing HVR-950 firmware

To install the firmware for the HVR-950, download the file "xc3028-v27.fw", which is attached to this page, verify that its md5sum is 293dc5e915d9a0f74a368f8a2ce3cc10 and then copy it to the directory "/lib/firmware":

If the attached is missing, corrupted, doesn't match the md5sum or is otherwise unusable, you can obtain the firmware by doing the following as root:

        cd /tmp
        wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
        wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/extract.sh
        sh extract.sh
        cp dvb-fe-xc5000-1.1.fw /lib/firmware

Installing the Pinnacle PCTV HD firmware

To install the firmware for the Pinnacle PCTV HD PCI card, download the file "dvb-fe-xc5000-1.1.fw", which is attached to this page, verify that its md5sum is 9ded26647453de88b3eb9bd64b9f8c2d and then copy it to the directory "/lib/firmware":

If the attached is missing, corrupted, doesn't match the md5sum or is otherwise unusable, then follow the firmware instructions located here

Install the V4L drivers

To install the latest V4L drivers, do the folllowing as root

        # Backup existing V4L driver.
        mv /lib/modules/2.6.23-chw-4/kernel/drivers/media /backup_drivers_media
        apt-get update
        apt-get install mercurial linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux-source build-essential
        mkdir -p /myth/tmp
        cd /myth/tmp
        hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb
        cd v4l-dvb
        make kernel-links
        make
        make install

Pinnacle card only

Follow this step only if you are adding a Pinnacle card.

Reboot you system and your card is ready to configure as a "DVB DTV capture card" in mythtv-setup. If you are using the card for clear QAM tuning, set the signal timeout and tuning timeout to 15,000 miliseconds in the capture card setup screen.

Instructions for getting the Pinnacle remote to work are at PinnacleRemoteHowTo

HVR-950 only: Test the drivers and firmware

Now reboot the system. When it comes back up,

        modprobe em28xx
        modprobe em28xx-dvb

Test to see if things work.

HVR-950 only: Make the changes persist across reboots

If everything works, then you need to ensure that the driver loads on every boot. I did this by adding the following line to the end of /etc/modules:

        em28xx
        em28xx-dvb

Original instructions

The following will enable the Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner to work with Knoppmyth R5.5. The advatnage of using this approach is that it install a V4L driver that is known to work with the HVR-950. The downside is that this version of V4L is a private branch that does not work well with many other cards. It also does not work well if you have multiple HVR-950's. I strongly suggest using the new instructions instead of these.

As root

        apt-get update
        apt-get install mercurial linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux-source build-essential
        cd /lib/firmware
        wget http://konstantin.filtschew.de/v4l-firmware/firmware_v4.tgz
        tar xvzf firmware_v4.tgz
        rm firmware_v4.tgz
        cd /myth/tmp
        hg clone http://mcentral.de/hg/~mrec/v4l-dvb-kernel
        cd v4l-dvb-kernel
        make kernel-links
        make
        make install

Now reboot the system. When it comes back up,

        modprobe em2880-dvb

Test to see if things work. If they do, then you need to ensure that the driver loads on every boot. I did this by adding the following line to the end of /etc/modules:

        em2880-dvb