Freevo Setup

We watch our tv on Linux using freevo. It works very well most of the time but late last week, we had a hard drive suddenly start making ominous noises. We had the OS on one hard drive and we save all of our data on another and luckily the system drive was the one that decided to sound very ill.

Dear Reader gently copied all the data off it and then quickly turned it off. He scrounged another drive and so we spent part of our public holiday reinstalling the system drive and configuring it all to our liking using the backup as a template.

We had been running the 2.6.16 debian kernel and are now running that again. After trying to use 2.6.18, it panicked in something to do with ACPI and so we went back to a kernel we knew worked.

I'm just writing these notes so that next time something happens, I have something official to refer to.

We have two digital video cards a Twinhan bt878 clone and a Nova-T clone.

lspci -v says:

00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
       Subsystem: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd VisionPlus DVB card
       Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
       Memory at e2000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
       Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
       Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2

00:09.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
       Subsystem: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd VisionPlus DVB Card
       Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
       Memory at e2001000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
       Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
       Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2

00:0a.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7146 (rev 01)
       Subsystem: Technotrend Systemtechnik GmbH Technotrend-Budget/Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T DVB card
       Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 12
       Memory at e2002000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]

With this debian kernel they almost work out of the box now. You need to blacklist a module for the saa7146 module. You add this line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

blacklist stradis

Then you add the dvb-bt8xx module to the bottom of /etc/modules file because it doesn't know which one to load or something equally funky.

The other thing to do is to download the kernel source package, untar it and in the /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.16/Documentation/dvb directory, run

./get_dvb_firmware tda10045

for our version of the card and copy the downloaded firmware file to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware.

Then you can run tzap on the two cards and check that they work. You'll need a channels.conf or to do a scan like normal - I could just copy from the old box.

We also had to set up X to talk to our tv and go through our freevo settings.

What's great is that it's the first time that box has had a clean install of the os in ages and it had a lot of cruft of stuff we'd tried out over the years. It seems to be running a lot faster.