Freevo and the Aver Tv Volar - 3 tv cards

The next task with setting up the new box is getting the new usb tv card to work. It was very cheap and we just thought we'd try it out. Luckily I'd just had to use the get_dvb_firmware script from the kernel source for the other tv card so this one was a doddle.

Plug it in and dmesg says:
usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
usb 1-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
dvb-usb: found a 'AVerMedia AVerTV DVB-T Volar' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)

Googled dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw and found various sites where I could down load the fw file.
Put it in /lib/firmware. Unplugged the usb tv card. Plugged it back in again and got:

usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
usb 1-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
dvb-usb: found a 'AVerMedia AVerTV DVB-T Volar' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw'
dib0700: firmware started successfully.
dvb-usb: found a 'AVerMedia AVerTV DVB-T Volar' in warm state.
dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
DVB: registering new adapter (AVerMedia AVerTV DVB-T Volar)
DVB: registering frontend 2 (DiBcom 7000MA/MB/PA/PB/MC)...
MT2060: successfully identified (IF1 = 1220)
input: IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver as /class/input/input7
dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 150 msecs.
dvb-usb: AVerMedia AVerTV DVB-T Volar successfully initialized and connected.


ran tzap and instantly got a lock.

My work here is done :-)

Now of course I have to make freevo work with one card watching and two cards taping.

Freevo and TV Card Again - Blogs are Useful

In October 2006 I blogged about setting up a new tv card to work with Freevo. Today I set up a new box and I referred to my own blog post to set it up. Isn't that cool.

We've got two digital tv cards and one was working and one wasn't. I could run scan and tzap and get a lock on adapter 1 but adapter 0 just said:

sylvia:/usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-t# tzap -a0 -c /tmp/channels.conf "ABC1"
using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0' and '/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0'
tuning to 226500000 Hz
video pid 0x0200, audio pid 0x028a
status 00 | signal ffff | snr 0000 | ber 0001fffe | unc 00000000 |
status 00 | signal ffff | snr 0000 | ber 0001fffe | unc 00000000 |
status 00 | signal ffff | snr 0000 | ber 0001fffe | unc 00000000 |
status 00 | signal ffff | snr 0000 | ber 0001fffe | unc 00000000 |

The new tv box is called sylvia because she's silver :-)

Swapped the cables over - and same result. Looked in dmesg (which I should have done first) and found


tda1004x: found firmware revision 0 -- invalid
tda1004x: waiting for firmware upload (dvb-fe-tda10045.fw)...
tda1004x: no firmware upload (timeout or file not found?)
tda1004x: firmware upload failed

lspci says

04:00.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
04:00.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
04:01.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7146 (rev 01)


Found my block post and it helpfully told me to download the kernel source package (we use debian), look in the Documentation/dvb directory and run

get_dvb_firmware tda10045

This downloads the firmware and you then copy it to in our case /lib/firmware.

run tzap again:

tda1004x: found firmware revision 0 -- invalid
tda1004x: waiting for firmware upload (dvb-fe-tda10045.fw)...
tda1004x: no firmware upload (timeout or file not found?)
tda1004x: firmware upload failed
tda1004x: found firmware revision 0 -- invalid
tda1004x: waiting for firmware upload (dvb-fe-tda10045.fw)...
tda1004x: firmware upload complete
tda1004x: found firmware revision 2c -- ok


The other stuff I had to do then with blacklisting modules etc is no longer necessary.
we are running a 2.6.24 kernel.

tzaps happily now.
Now onto the usb tv card :-)

Feeling of Successful Altruism

I've received several thank you notes from people who've found answers to problems in my neglected blog. The most common is my post about finding the thinkpad wireless switch. The little one, you can't see from above on the front of the notebook that when you turn hit it by accident disables your wireless. I had to do a google search to find it - finding the manual originally and some people have found the answer from my blog. I have done some good in the world :-)