Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-3000

Kernel Support

At the time of writing this (January 07), the HVR3000 is a fairly new card. The 2.6.19 kernel was the first stable release to include support, but the defacto kernel available for most of my current OSs is 2.6.17. Hopefully the likes of Debian and Kubuntu will upgrade soon, but if your kernel is pre 2.6.19 you will need a new version of the v4l bit of the kernel.

V4L (Steve Toth's hvr3000)

Steve Toth is the maintainer of the hvr3000 drivers. He has a working Mercurial (like SVN) copy of v4l (hvr3000) which I believe is the bits which have been patched into the 2.6.19 kernel. I found this http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=17223, which explained how to get and install it. Here is the lowdown:- You will need kernel source, gcc, g++, dvb-apps (aka dvb-utils on some distros) and mercurial.

1) To get the source from Steve Toth type:-

 hg clone http://www.linuxtv.org/hg/~stoth/hvr3000

2) cd to hvr3000 (which has just been created)

3) make (make sure you are booted up to the right kernel before you run make)

Problems

I encountered a number of problems getting mine to work

1) I found that that failed first time, because I was booted into a homemade kernel, and discovered the build expects the kernel uname -r to match that of the kernel source. The first time you run make it stores a file with these details in it and if they're wrong, you're doomed until you <make distclean> and ensure the kernel name and source or the same, or give the build code the appropriate parameters.

2) I also discovered just because gcc is installed, g++ isn't neccesarily.

3) I had multiple build errors relating to files in v4l/aci.c relating to sound mixing or something. So go into <make menuconfig> select 'audio devices for multimedia', then unselect 'ACI Mixer' (press space to unselect), now press escape twice and save your kernel settings. Rebuild this time without the ACI stuff.

4) I also found after installing this, my Webcam stopped working (although I haven't tried to fix this yet).

Installation

If that was all successfull then:-

1) make install (this will install the built modules over your kernel ones, in your /lib/modules directory)

2) reboot

Configuration

Once the modules are installed, type <modprobe cx88_dvb> should load everything if it isn't already.

There seems to be some issue getting the tuner to attach to the card, which needs further tracking down. Needless to say, someone suggested adding 'options cx88xx i2c_scan=1' to my /etc/modules.conf so I created a file containing just that line in my /etc/modprobe.d directory and it seems to work. This needs work to figure out why.

LIRC seems to work out of the box (at least for me). The remote sends cursor commands (up down left right) and enter and numbers quite happily regardless of application. I need to do further work to get the other things to work in a normal way.

Newbie stuff

Ok, so it all seems to be working, how do you test it. Well firstly the devices the drivers create should exist. Firstly /dev/video? (where ? will be a number, in my case its /dev/video0) shows the video stream. Next there will be a /dev/dsp? which shows the audio stream (presented as a line in type ossdsp device), which also shows up as an alsa device (if you've loaded cx88_alsa). For alsa see /proc/asound/cards to see which device is for the cx88, then look in /dev/snd/pcmC?D0c (where ? will be the card number found earlier) aka ALSA:hw.?,0. To test the card use tvtime or xawtv or even mplayer to watch the video stream. I found tvtime slightly easier to setup and control (with a mouse). Once you're happy you can change channel (up and down I believe) and change device (the key i) you're ready to try pulling it all together.

Sound

To hear sound from the card you will need to pipe the sound output from the cards sound device back into your sound card. There are a number of ways of doing it, but I only managed to make 1 work properly. In theory you can use sox to stream from one device to another, but I had problems with resampling and it just sounded wrong. You can also use arecord to get data from the alsa device, then pipe it to aplay using - as a source (stdin), but when I did that the sound came out nearly a second later than the picture. I had success only using mplayer:-

 mplayer tv://25 -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:norm=PAL-I:chanlist=europe-west:\
                   alsa:adevice=hw.2,0:amode=1:audiorate=48000:volume=100:\
                   immediatemode=0:buffersize=32 -aspect 16:9

Where My Sky DigiBox is tuned to channel 25, my video card is /dev/video0 it's PAL-I (europe-west) and the cx88_alsa device is card2 sub 0 (ie hw.2,0). I want sound in stereo (amode=1) at 48k. I had problems with buffers overflowing, so I set the buffersize to twice what was needed and the sound is now perfect.

My Sky DigiBox is setup for a 16:9 screen, even though PAL-I isn't so the -aspect 16:9 corrects the screen size