Hauppauge WinTV HVR850 2040:b140 unusable with cx231xx

[Connor Behan <connor.behan@gmail.com>]

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I ordered an HVR850 USB TV tuner, planning to use it with an NTSC cable input. The LinuxTV.org page <http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-850> said that there were three different models, so I checked and mine is 2040:b140... the last one to be supported. A discussion post <http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-850#Possibly_Valuable_Information> there said that the card was working as of 2013 but my experience has been closer to these ones:

https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2011-September/021962.html
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-media/msg49030.html

Since it was my first time using v4l, I didn't know what modules to load. Upon inserting the tuner, I saw 16 new modules autoloaded: media, tuner, videodev, videobuf_core, videobuf_vmalloc, v4l2_common, rc_core, cx25840, cx2341x, cx231xx, cx231xx_alsa, cx231xx_dvb, dvb_core, tda18271, tea5767, lgdt3305. This creates a few new device nodes:

/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0*
/dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0*
/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0*
/dev/dvb/adapter0/net0*
/dev/v4l
/dev/vbi0
/dev/video*
/dev/video0

The ones with asterisk are only created sometimes. The dmesg output was quite problematic (first_dmesg <http://paste.ubuntu.com/6555061/>) and I later found out this was because of lgdt3305_attach() and tda18271_attach(). If I explicitly modprobe lgdt3305 and tda18271 before inserting the tuner, I get something better (second_dmesg <http://paste.ubuntu.com/6555075/>). However, one troubling thing is __tda18271_write_regs failing with -32. This is probably the very first call to __tda18271_write_regs being done in tda18271_init_regs(). So the registers on this chip that is essential to use the analog part of the tuner are not initialized. When I try to actually use the tuner, the same error appears again (third_dmesg <http://paste.ubuntu.com/6555081/>).

I was testing it with the command "mplayer -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:norm=NTSC:chanlist=us-cable tv://" and seeing a green screen. But I also see a black screen when using xawtv and a 0 byte file when using "cat /dev/video0 > foo". I tried a few different machines and kernel versions.

Some people have suggested patches. One was a user named Jimbo on http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=1445 (I'm guessing the polaris4 link is broken because that was merged to mailine?) Anyway he said that HAUPPAUGE_USBLIVE2 workarounds for error -71 might need to be there for HAUPPAUGE_EXETER. I tried this and it didn't work. One person who blogged about trouble with the HAUPPAUGE_USBLIVE2 http://csharpnews.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/usb-live-2-on-ubuntu-shows-only-black-screen/ said it was fixed by getting rid of a "value |= (1 << 7)". I tried this and it also didn't work.

Before I dangerously try any more patches when I don't know what they do... do you guys know how to fix this?



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