Hauppauge HVR 900 tuner and Ubuntu 8.10
Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex, has been out for several weeks now, and I’ve been testing the HVR 900 tuner since the later alpha releases starting some months ago. Now we have a final OS release just how well does this tuner work?
First of all I’m using a vanilla HVR 900, watch out for those pesky HVR-900H versions that are knocking around. There is some work underway to get the newest versions of the Em2880 driver merged into the mainline kernel, but it appears that the em28xx.ko module that ships with Intrepid works with my tuner with no patching required. Your own mileage might vary.
There is one gotcha, Ubuntu doesn’t ship with the required firmware. This is relatively simple to acquire, and should be installed prior to plugging in your tuner.
cd /tmp
wget -c http://www.steventoth.net/linux/xc5000/HVR-12×0-14×0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
apt-get install unzip
unzip -x HVR-12×0-14×0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip
cd Driver85
perl /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r`/Documentation/video4linux/extract_xc3028.pl
cp xc3028-v27.fw /lib/firmware/
It is worth checking the md5sum on the firmware file
293dc5e915d9a0f74a368f8a2ce3cc10 /lib/firmware/xc3028-v27.fw
Then plugin in your tuner and you should see the driver and firmware load
[ 124.618386] xc2028 0-0061: Loading 80 firmware images from xc3028-v27.fw, type: xc2028 firmware, ver 2.7
I haven’t tried stress testing this driver for an extended period, but I can tune to both analogue and DVB-T as shown in my previous HVR 900 articles.