Category | bridges

We've had a handful of reports cropping up related to HVR2200 model#89619 cards. With Ubuntu 12.04.1 the driver would attempt to load firmware from file NXP7164-2010-03-10.1.fw length 4019072 as defined in the saa7164-fw.c driver source. (Hint: it's not really an Ubuntu error) Sep 13 07:50:56 dell kernel: [ 83.432854] saa7164_downloadimage() image corrupt Sep 13 07:50:56 dell kernel: [ 83.432868] bootloader d/l has failed Sep 13 07:50:56 dell kernel: [ 83.433068] Failed to boot firmware, no features registered Technically, NXP have two different revisions of the SAA7164 chip, rev2...

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After a rather large bug hunt, I've finally submitted the HVR-950q patches upstream. In the end, we created 24 patches addressing a ton of longstanding bugs: au8522: fix intermittent lockup of analog video decoder au8522: Fix off-by-one in SNR table for QAM256 au8522: properly recover from the au8522 delivering misaligned TS streams au0828: Make the s_reg and g_reg advanced debug calls work against the bridge xc5000: properly show quality register values xc5000: add support for showing the SNR and gain in the debug output xc5000: properly report i2c write failures au0828:...

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Continued debugging has produced another dozen fixes for the HVR-950q. Most of these are low-probability failure conditions (race conditions, etc). However take a bunch of 1/1000 chance items together and you're likely to hit one of them once in a while... A couple of noteworthy changes: Firmware load time has been sped up to 2.9 seconds (down from 8-10 seconds). This should eliminate the need for MythTV users to specify the "no_poweoff" xc5000 modprobe since it will now load fast enough to avoid a mythfrontend timeout. Fix a case where the xc5000 tuner enters a failure state and all subsequent...

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I finally spent the day and gathered up all the various patches I had kicking around for the HVR-950q. They can be found here: http://git.kernellabs.com/?p=dheitmueller/cx23885_fixes.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/950q_fixes This includes the longstanding bug at startup that would cause the xc5000 to not properly bind on the digital side, a rather nasty case that hangs the analog video decoder in adverse signal conditions, and a case where sometimes digital tuning succeeds but doesn't ever return a transport stream to userland. It also resolves the confusion users see when the run tools like...

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Well, that was painful. After a full day working with the various cards, I managed to get all of them working. A couple of caveats: The analog tuner on the HVR-1250 isn't supported yet. The composite and s-video inputs are working but the mt2131 driver doesn't have the required support for tuning to analog stations. The analog tuner is supported though on the HVR-1255, 1800 (both retail and OEM), 1850, etc. (since it's a different chip) While ALSA audio when doing raw capture *is* working, it doesn't seem to work with tvtime for some reason (I added the original ALSA capture support...

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Ever wonder why it's so common for somebody to check in a change to make some new product work, causing a regression in the tuner that *you* have? Well, here's why: All these boards use the exact same driver, despite the fact that they have different core chips and only some of them have an onboard MPEG encoder. To make matters worse, look at all the different input types: Even getting all the equipment together to do the testing is a PITA. I spent twenty minutes digging through boxes for a RCA L/R audio to 1/8" audio converter. It's trivial to accidentally make a change which...

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When we last left off, we had reproduced the basic behavior that users reported, using the stock command line tools such as v4l2-ctl and "mplayer /dev/video1". Now we'll talk a bit about the debugging process. To give some context, let's look at a quick diagram showing the various parts of the device: (click to enlarge) For starters, let's now look at what the actual user sees after running the following commands: v4l2-ctl -d 1 -f 62.25 --set-fmt-video=width=720,height=480,pixelformat=mpeg mplayer /dev/video1 The video feed itself is a set of colorbars, a well known reference...

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As a result of numerous users reporting that their HVR-1800 didn't work in analog mode, I finally got some time tonight to dig into the situation. If you don't care about the details, the short answer is I'm working on it and be patient. If you want to get some insight into the gory debugging process, keep reading... Over the next few blog posts, I'll be walking through the typical debugging process. I don't actually know what the actual problem(s) are at this point, so this is a chance for those of you at home to play along. Here's what we do know: Users have reported a variety of different...

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As of the release of Linux Kernel 3.1, Hauppauge's WinTV-Aero-m is fully supported for use with both ATSC and DVB-T, using the new MFE framework within dvb-usb to represent two frontends on a single DVB adapter. This makes the Aero-m the first semi-worldwide terrestrial digital television broadcast receiver to be supported under Linux. The device is built of two LG broadcast demodulators and a MaxLinear SoC. The first LG demodulator, LG DT3305, has been well supported in Linux for ATSC ever since I released it a few years ago. I've written a new driver to support the other LG demodulator,...

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After quite some time of talking about it, we finally got around to getting the analog support for the HVR-1850 submitted upstream. Support for all things analog is present and tested on all the various input types: the MPEG encoder, raw capture, analog audio. This patch series also includes a fix for a long-standing regression in the HVR-1800 as well. http://git.kernellabs.com/?p=stoth/cx23885-hvr1850-fixups.git Users are free to try it building from the above git tree, or they can wait a few days for it to be merged into the upstream linux-media tree. The HVR-1850 is a really nice...

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