Re: HVR-950Q problem under MythTV

[Bob Cunningham <rcunning@acm.org>]

On 10/28/2009 08:40 PM, Devin Heitmueller wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Bob Cunningham<rcunning@acm.org>  wrote:
>> I just completed a fresh install of MythTV 0.22 RC1 on my fully-updated
>> Fedora 11 system.  My tuner is an HVR-950Q, connected to cable.  The tuner
>> works fine under tvtime (SD) and xine (HD).
>>
>> All MythTV functions work, except LiveTV.  The problem is that mythfrontend
>> times out waiting for the HVR-950Q to tune to the first station.  This
>> appears to be due to the very long HVR-950Q firmware load time, since no
>> errors are reported by the backend.
>>
>> Unfortunately, mythfrontend has a hard-wired 7 second timeout for most
>> requests sent to the backend.  It seems this timeout works fine under normal
>> circumstances for every other tuner MythTV works with.
>>
>> The following is repeated in dmesg after every attempt:
>>
>>   xc5000: waiting for firmware upload (dvb-fe-xc5000-1.6.114.fw)...
>>   usb 1-2: firmware: requesting dvb-fe-xc5000-1.6.114.fw
>>   xc5000: firmware read 12401 bytes.
>>   xc5000: firmware uploading...
>>   xc5000: firmware upload complete...
>>
>> It looks like the HVR-950Q driver reloads the firmware at every possible
>> opportunity, independent of the hardware state, each time either the SD or
>> HD device is opened, such as when changing from an SD channel on /dev/video0
>> to an HD channel on /dev/dvb/adapter0.  Is this necessary?
>>
>> Is it possible to tell the driver to ease up on the firmware reloads?  I
>> don't mind if the first attempt fails, but the second attempt should succeed
>> (without a reload).
>>
>> Alternatively, are faster firmware loads possible?
>>
>> Should I open a bug on this?
>
> Hello Bob,
>
> In order to avoid the firmware reloading condition, you need to add a
> modprobe option called "no_poweroff=1" for the xc5000 driver to your
> modprobe.conf file and then reboot your computer.  I agree that this
> is a very annoying workaround, but have not had a chance to try to
> find another solution (the i2c master in the au0828 hardware is poorly
> designed and this same problem occurs in Windows but the problem is
> not as noticeable because the Windows application doesn't as
> aggressively power down the tuner).

For F11, I appended the line "options xc5000 no_poweroff=1" to /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf

Rather than power down (shudder), I did the following:
1. Unplug HVR-950Q
2. rmmod xc5000
3. modprobe xc5000 no_poweroff=1
4. Plug in HVR-950Q

> Also, in order for the video to be rendered properly, you need to make
> sure your capture resolution for LiveTV mode and the various capture
> modes is set to 720x480 (the default in MythTV is 480x480).  Without
> this change, the picture will appear to be vertically stretched.  This
> is actually a bug in MythTV not properly handling analog capture
> products that do not have an onboard hardware scaler (I did work in
> 0.22 to get the analog support working but have not had an opportunity
> to fix this bug yet).

Done.

> If you still have trouble, feel free to reply to this message.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Devin

All is well with the world: The tuner is tuning, MythTV is mythic, and I am a vidiot.

Thanks!