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 :-)