(SOLVED):VLC (PVR) Issues with WinTV HR1600 card

[jdrichardson]

I've installed the 64-bit LinuxMint/Debian distro on my AMD64 system with GeForce 6150 graphics chip and WinTV HR1600 tv card. Things work great except for being able to watch TV with the VLC-PVR function for the WinTV setup.

VLC works fine when playing DVD's or MP3's, but when I try to use it to watch TV I get the following message:
"Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'pvr://'. Check the log for details."

I'm not sure what log - I did look at a systems log but nothing jumped out at me. I did notice that when installing the distro, it "burped" when trying to install the cx18 driver for the Conextant chip used for the WinTV card. I'm not sure it was installed. I did download and try to install a cx18 driver but it had no effect.

I can use Ubuntu 10.10 and LinuxMint-10 fine for this function, but I'd really like to use the Debian-based one. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Roken]

If I'm honest I had no end of problems with my Hauppauge card (HVR-1300). In the end I bought a no-name USB stick instead, which works an absolute treat.

Steve

[jdrichardson]

The burp I referred to in my original post regarding the cx18 driver was an error message that said said it couldn't load the firmware for the driver, and had the firmware been loaded into the "hot-plug" directory (Huh??). So I tried again to build and install the cx18 driver for the Conextant chip used on the WinTV card.
Still a no-go. I also tried removing the debian muti-media repository, removing, and re-installing VLC per another post in this forum. No luck here either.

Rather than spend more time with this, I reinstalled Ubuntu 10.10. Things worh fine with that distro. I'll check things out again in 6 months or so to see if Debian performance has improved. I really liked its look and feel.

[slyski]

I have nearly the same setup you have regarding the graphics chip and HR1600 (AMD64 system with GeForce 6150 graphics chip and WinTV HR1600 tv card) and in my experience with this and other distros I had to put "vmalloc=256M" in the kernel line in the grub files (menu.lst and grub.cfg) to get the cx18 module and firmware loaded properly at boot up. I researched this sometime ago but can't remember where I found this info.

Hope this can help ya
slyski

[jdrichardson]

I was able to solve the problem by copying the driver firmware in folders /lib/firmware/ and /lib64/firmware/. I wasn't sure exactly which one (lib or lib64) so I used both. The firmware can be retrieved from a link under "Firrmware" located at:

http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Cx18

The sound is a little choppy but the picture is good. In other distro's I had to disable pulseaudio - may have to do it here. Anyway I'm now up and running! I'm glad because I really like this distro.

Good job LinuxMint guys!!!