So I picked one of these up on a whim last week (for $82 shipped, it was worth a try) as one person who bought it at the online store I was browsing said he got it working in mythtv after a week of messing with IVTV. I've spent all day trying to get this thing to work. It showed up as /dev/v4l1 on the R5A22 kernel, but I couldn't do anything with it in myth. I compiled 2.6.15-rc7 and have been running it all day (the system seems "snappier" when the kernel was compiled for K8 extensions) with the hopes that because the card was patched into V4L recently, it would work.

As it stands now, in MythTV, I can set it up as a V4L device, and select either composite or svideo input (I don't think it has svid, but whatever), and analog video will show up on the screen from whatever I have plugged into the composite jack. This wasn't what I was going for.

Here are snippets from dmesg regarding this card and my old bt878 card:


Old bt878 card:


IVTV



and AverTVHD A180



Apperantly the card is very similar to the ATI HDTV Wonder card in that it uses the same NXT2004 demodulator, and the Philips saa7133 which is used in a lot of IVTV cards (I'm still not sure what IVTV does besides provide drivers for cards that encode compressed video). I found a utility in the linux-2.6.15-rc7/Documentation/dvb directory for extracting the firmware for this card (it downloaded the windows driver from aver's website and parsed it out of there), so I ran it and stuck the dvb-fe-nxt2004.fw file into /lib/firmware and /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware. If I /sbin/lsmod | grep -c nxt2004, it returns 0.

Above and beyond all of this, I'm still not sure where I am going to set this up in mythTV if I ever get it working. Will it be an MPEG2 card or DVB card? I'm confused.

At least I have the firewire from my DCT6200 working properly, as well the old crappy Hauppauge card too, but I really look forward to terrestrial broadcasts to give my box the triple threat with two HD sources.

Please help me! Once I get this squared away, I promise I'll go through the whole thing and write it up real nice for the wiki. TIA,

-Rich

*Bump*

Anyone? Still haven't made any progress and I'm at a brick wall. Thnx.

It should be a handled as a dvb card in mythtv.

Hmm...still no progress on this. It seems like the kernel won't pick up the NXT2002 front end chip. I'm not well versed on Linux hardware detection. It does pick up the SAA7133 tuner, but no front end chip, so I all I can do is see the SVID and COMPOSITE input from the aver card. The NXT2002 chip should have been supported in many older versions of the kernel. When I configured the kernel (graphically or menu) it didn't have the ability to set options next to the NXT2002 chip, or many others. I am going to reload the box with R30.1 tomorrow (getting a nice HTPC case). Does anyone have any ideas on this?

Having just gotten that same setup to work, perhaps I can help.

The AverTVHD will show up on two different device interfaces.
The S-video/composite port shows up at a bttv/v4l2 device
on /dev/video<n>. And as a dvb device in /dev/dvb/adaptor<n>.
I also have a WinTV-250. The AverTVHD is /dev/video0 and
and /dev/dvb/adaptor0 and the WinTV-250 is /dev/video1. I have
drivers for both compiled into my kernel, but from your previous post
it looked like it properly identified things. I suggest you run
MAKEDEV dvb, and make sure you have the /dev/dvb/adaptor0
directory with the following entries in it:

audio0 ca0 demux0 dvr0 frontend0 net0 osd0 sec0 video0
audio1 ca1 demux1 dvr1 frontend1 net1 osd1 sec1 video1
audio2 ca2 demux2 dvr2 frontend2 net2 osd2 sec2 video2
audio3 ca3 demux3 dvr3 frontend3 net3 osd3 sec3 video3
audio4 ca4 demux4 dvr4 frontend4 net4 osd4 sec4 video4
audio5 ca5 demux5 dvr5 frontend5 net5 osd5 sec5 video5
audio6 ca6 demux6 dvr6 frontend6 net6 osd6 sec6 video6

From your previous post, what looks like is missing is the dvb frontend drivers. You should have something like this in dmesg:

DVB: registering new adapter (saa7133[0]).
DVB: registering frontend 0 (Nextwave NXT200X VSB/QAM frontend)...
cx2388x v4l2 driver version 0.0.5 loaded
cx2388x blackbird driver version 0.0.5 loaded
cx2388x dvb driver version 0.0.5 loaded
tuner 0-0061: chip found @ 0xc2 (saa7133[0])
tuner 0-0063: chip found @ 0xc6 (saa7133[0])

Once this is done, Mythtv should see the card when you select DVB interface in mythtv-setup.

Thank you! I may need more help after I get my Nforce 430/GeForce 6150 board squared away and operational. dmesg never gave any mention of the NXT2002 chip, so I was a little worried, and this was on a brand new kernel with every module enabled under V4L/DVB. It was my first hand made kernel though, so I might have messed something up.

_________________
-rich

KnoppMyth HDPVR WIP
(A 64 3200+ venice, asus a8n-vm csm NF430/GF6150, 1GB RAM, 560 GB/3 HD's, DVD +-RW, DCT 6200/firewire/Aver TVHD MCE A180/WinTV BT878 tuners, small black micro atx cube, big sound, 33" SVGA presentation monitor)

How does one go about installing the dvb frontend drivers for the A180?

I finally got the Avermedia A180 to work with the new release of Knoppmyth that cesman put out R5B7 (mostly his work, just a little extra tweaking on my part).
check out:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... order=asc&