I've up till now been running a rather antiquated hand-built vdr 1.2.6 on a similarly moldy RH9 installation, accessed mainly via vdradmin.
I now moved the card (Hauppauge full-feature DVB-C w/CI+CAM) to a new Fedora Core 4 installation with ready-built vdr-1.3.37-0.lvn.1.4 and vdradmin-0.97-1.lvn.6.am3.4.2.4 from Livna.org, but all did not go according to plan.
The first hurdle was downloading and installing the card firmware, why, oh why, can't the package creators actually document what they have and have not included with it? Both packages just include the standard (nigh-useless) original documentation. Of course the fact that vdr says the firmware should go to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware instead of the correct location /lib/firmware did not help much, could this be fixed?
Once that was done, trying out the old 1.2.6 channels.conf (which I had generated using my converter, see [1] below), I realized vdr only found the national broadcaster (YLE) bouquet channels, everything else (both free and encrypted) was missing. I decided to just try scanning the cable, but this didn't work too well:
# /usr/bin/scandvb -o vdr /usr/share/dvb-apps/dvb-c/fi-htv scanning /usr/share/dvb-apps/dvb-c/fi-htv using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0' and '/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0' initial transponder 283000000 5900000 0 4
tune to: 283:M128:C:5900:
WARNING: filter timeout pid 0x0011 WARNING: filter timeout pid 0x0000 WARNING: filter timeout pid 0x0010 dumping lists (0 services) Done.
(syslog entries)
Dec 26 00:15:12 piglet kernel: av7110_wait_msgstate: timeout waiting for MSGSTATE 0040 Dec 26 00:15:13 piglet kernel: dvb-ttpci: __av7110_send_fw_cmd(): timeout waiting for COMMAND idle Dec 26 00:15:13 piglet kernel: dvb-ttpci: av7110_send_fw_cmd(): av7110_send_fw_cmd error -110 Dec 26 00:15:13 piglet kernel: dvb-ttpci: av7110_fw_cmd error -110
Consulting the linuxtv Wiki [2] I found out that the format of the file had changed, and noted that the new vdr had changed my original channels file to include the bouquet information for YLE. I did a few changes to my converter to do likewise [3], but things did not really improve. I still have just the YLE channels and nothing else.
I'm pretty much out of ideas. What can cause this, and what can I do? Does anyone have a ready working channels.conf for DVB-C in Helsinki?
1. http://eetis.co.jyu.fi/dvb/ 2. http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Syntax_of_channels.conf 3. Though, where am I supposed to find a proper provider name, which as far as I know technically is NOT the same thing as a bouquet name, as several providers can share one bouquet?