I recently installed an Hauppauge Win TV Express tv tuner card. Its working ok for FC3, and Kubunto for sound and vision now, after about 3 weeks of googling and trial and error rmmod/modprobe for various options, but the problem I have is to do with FC2.

I booted up one of my FC2 installs for the first time since I installed the TV card, and an entry was made in /etc/modprobe.conf "alias char-major-81 bttv". Using the TV viewer xawdecode I had vision, but no sound. I've spent a lot of time trying to get the sound working, and as I've said, it's now working with FC3, and Kubuntu, but now when I boot up FC2 it's like the card isn't detected, because bttv isn't loaded. /sbin/lspci show both the video, and audio parts of the Hauppauge card, and if I manually modprobe tda9887 with it's options, and bttv with it's options, I get sound and vision ok using xawdecode.

The big question is. What do I need to do to get bttv to load at bootup?

Secondly. Where is this list of char-major items? I'm sure I found it once, but can't remember where. Perhaps the number has been changed, and is the reason bttv isn't being loaded.

Any help really appreciated.

Nigel. aka farpoint.

Put the tda9887 and bttv on a line by themselves in your /etc/modules file then in the /etc/modules.conf or maybe in the modprobe.conf you mention a line for each with the options like this.

Of course using your proper options this should get the modules loaded with the options used when loading.

Hi HappyTux. Nice to here from you again.

It's not so much the options that I have a problem with, but the fact that the bttv module isn't even loading. I have 2 FC2 installs that I have tried on this machine. Both have detected the TV card and have created automatically the "char-major-81 bttv" entry in /etc/modprobe.conf. this appears to be correct from all my googling. Initially when I booted up either of these FC2's the TV card was detected correctly as card=10, but the tuner was incorrect. It was detected as an NTSC tuner, tuner=2. So I added to /etc/modprobe.conf, the line. "options bttv tuner=38" which is the correct one. Then when booting up I got vision, but no sound, but at least bttv was loading ok.

Now I can't even get bttv to load when booting up, but can load it manually using modprobe on the CLI.

It seems to have something to do with this "char-major-81 bttv" line, which is why I asked if anyone knew the command to get the print out for this char-major stuff. Perhaps the numbers changed or something.

If I was in Debian, I would just add a line with "bttv" on it to /etc/modules, run update-modules, and the darned thing would load.

What alternative line could I put in /etc/modprobe.conf to load bttv? I tried "install bttv", but got some nasty messages about that on the bootup text.

It's all a bit weird, as it was loading ok initially.

Nigel. aka farpoint.

No the char-major-81 would not be changing those (char-major-??? entries) are standard entries that should always be the same. If your running KDE then in the Kinfocenter --> Devices you can see which are detected on your install you would be looking for the video4linux entry.

Putting it in the same in FC2 does not work that is a pretty much standard way of loading modules across distros.
Yeah certainly does seem strange for sure, a dirty hack to try would be putting something like this in a script that get runs on startup.

This should load everything properly on Debian I would put the lines near the bottom of the /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh now on FC2 not sure I have not run any of their installs since RH 6.?.

Hi Stephen. Sorry for the apalling delay in replying.

I've got bttv working on FC2 now. Not loading at bootup, but with the aid of an additional line in /etc/modprobe.conf , "pre-install bttv", bttv now loads when I open Xawtv. On bootup the text shows the "pre-install bttv" line to be a bad line, but it works ok when I start Xawtv, so I'll put up with that.

The whole problem on FC2 appears to be IRQ related. When booted up /sbin/lspci shows both the video, and the audio parts of the card at IRQ9, although
cat /proc/interrupts shows IRQ9 as non-existant. When I open Xawtv, and bttv loads, the IRQ for the video part of the card changes to IRQ10, and cat /proc/interrupts shows bttv added to IRQ10, which is already being used by the soundcard, and the graphics card, but this is how it is on all the other distros that I have a TV viewer on.

Certainly Debian based distros are easier. I just setup Debian Sarge, by adding the modules with their options into /etc/modules, and it works like clockwork.

The only problem left is to do with the images. It seems like some sort of latency/refresh problem. On FC5, Kubuntu, and Sarge, movement is a bit jerky, and credits definately scroll in a very jerky way. FC2, and FC3 are worse, in that any movement leaves sparkly trails behind of the previous frames. This may be that the machine isn't fast enough. 1.3Ghz, with 1GB RAM. Graphics card is Cyberbladei1 (trident driver).

I've tried Xawtv, or Xawdecode, with v4l2, and Xvideo, but no difference, except lower CPU useage uding Xvideo.

How fast is the machine you're using a TV card on?

Nigel.

Try adding pci=routeirq to the kernel line in your menu.lst file.
If using 2.6 kernel then you can create a file /etc/modprobe.d/tvcard with options bttv card=?? tuner=?? to have the module loaded with proper options if 2.4 then the /etc/modutils/aliases would be the file to put it in along with your alias char-major .. line then run update-modules.

Now I'm using AMD X2 running at 2.4ghz but in the past I've had one in a PII 350 192mb ram Nvidia card it worked well. I think the artifacts you are seeing here could be a result of the video card trying to display the video now I have never used a trident card in linux so can't be certain on this. But when I ran a dual head setup on my old Athlon 1.333ghz 512mb ram with Matrox PCI card that was displaying the TV card output it worked fine only problem there was not enough ram to run the screen at more than 640x480. What both the Nvidia and Matrox cards have in common is built video decoding, does the Cyberblade list video decoding in hardware as a feature?

Hi Stephen. I'm beginning to think that I'm working in the dark arts here with TV cards. I shut down Kubuntu, and boot up FC2. AT the GRUB menu I click on "a" and add pci=routeirq to the kernel, then "enter" boots it up. /sbin/lspci confirms that what was IRQ9 for both video and audio parts of the TV card are now IRQ10. /sbin/lsmod shows that the bttv module, and all the other stuff that goes with it have not been loaded.

Now for the sake of it I comment out the "pre-install bttv" line from /etc/modprobe.conf, just in case it was causing problems. Reboot, and same situation. The TV card is now at IRQ10, which is correct, but no bttv loaded. I'm just about to shut FC2 down, and think "Why not try Xawtv just for the hell of it". Click on it , and the darned thing loads bttv and starts up, and now I'm getting better images on FC2 than I'm getting on Kubuntu FC5, and Debian Sarge.

For your info I've put the output of /sbin/lspci -vv below for the Trident card, but I can't see much there.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1 (rev 6a) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
Subsystem: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66Mhz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 32
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 10
Region 0: Memory at e5800000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
Region 1: Memory at e6000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
Region 2: Memory at e5000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M]
Capabilities: [80] AGP version 2.0
Status: RQ=33 Iso- ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA+ ITACoh- GART64- HTrans- 64bit- FW- AGP3- Rate=x1,x2,x4
Command: RQ=1 ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA- AGP- GART64- 64bit- FW- Rate=<none>
Capabilities: [90] Power Management version 1
Flags: PMEClk- DSI+ D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-


I'm on the video4linux list, and there's a lot of work going on there to get different cards working, so I suppose I should be gratefull that the Hauppauge Win TV Express card works, but it has been quite a difficult path. Lots of googling, suggestions from various posts, including yourself. Most certainly "pci=routeirq" is going into my notebook. I don't know why, but running that at bootup has sort of fixed the problems with the images on FC2.

Now to the next, but not too important thing to fix. Why does Firefox, and Opera load Java applets ok, but Konqueror has a problem. This is using Sun's JRE 1.5.0.06, and 1.5.0.09. I'll put that question on a new thread.

Thanks for your help Stephen.

Nigel.

You may want to use that as a boot parameter in the other OS's as well then just to see if you can get even better reception there.
Found this page here which seems to suggest it has a DVD hardware something on it not actually saying decoder though ...

It was not getting the IRQ correctly then that caused the problems when it got it later I'd say but I'm really not an expert on this as I said above try it with the others as well to see if it improves further.

Go into the Settings --> Configure Konqueror then the Java & Javascript option make sure that Use KIO is set. Your Welcome BTW.

Hi Stephen. I'll try the "pci=routeirq" thing on the other distros, as it certainly has improved the images on FC2.

Thanks for finding the CyberBLADE i1 page. As you say, there isn't much on it though.

Regarding the Java problem, I'd already tried setting KIO with no change. Firefox & Opera using the Java plugin load the applets ok, but Konqueror doesn't use the plugin, and you have to reset the java path to where you have put Sun's JRE's java binary. I can get a US weather site that uses Java animation to run on Konqueror. It loads a bit slow, probably because I'm on dialup, but another site will only load one of 2 applets. My Smoothwall firewall has a shell access through the web interface, and that uses Java, but Konqueror won't load that applet, whereas Firefox will. Perhaps I'll start a new thread for this problem. it would be nice to find a solution.

Thanks for the help.

Nigel.

Can you post the URLs I have only checked a few sites but mine works without the plugin as it is not available on 64bit.

I've moved this Java problem to a new thread in the Fedora forum, as there's a bit of javaconsole output as well.

See: Java applets in Konqueror on FC2, and FC5

Nigel.