[SWLUG] Open PVRs [ was petition against BBC's Windows-only iPlayer]

[Philip Barnes]

On Sun, 2007-08-05 at 12:37 +0100, Julian Hall wrote:

> I have a Winfast VC100 XP card in my box (Athlon 2400XP / 1Gb RAM).  
> After a couple of years (literally) chasing my tail with various card 
> claiming to work in Linux but failing miserably this one apparently 
> does.  I have a 2.6.11 kernel at the moment, apparently 2.6.12 would me 
> less hassle but I don't know how to upgrade it (I've never really gone 
> *that* far into the guts of Linux).
> 
> Could some kind soul please give me baby steps on getting my card to 
> work?  I've googled around and it seems it will work with BTTV, the card 
> number is apparently 114.
> 
Hi Julian
Not sure if this will be any help to you, but this is how mine works.

The important thing on linux of any cards, whether they be a TV card or
a wireless card, is the chipset used. To find out what chipset is on
your card run lspci, in my case I run /sbin/lspci.

The important line is:
00:0c.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7133/SAA7135
Video Broadcast Decoder (rev d0)
Telling me that I have a Philips SAA7133/SAA7135 chipset.

Then in rc.local I have the following lines:

# TV Card DVB
/sbin/modprobe saa7134-dvb
#
mkdir /dev/dvb
chmod 755 /dev/dvb
for i in `seq 0 3`; do
echo "Creating DVB devices in /dev/dvb/adapter$i"
mkdir /dev/dvb/adapter$i
chmod 755 /dev/dvb/adapter$i
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/video0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 0`
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/audio0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 1`
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/frontend0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 3`
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/demux0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 4`
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/dvr0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 5`
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/ca0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 6`
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/net0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 7`
mknod -m 0660 /dev/dvb/adapter$i/osd0 c 212 `expr 64 \* $i + 8`
chown root /dev/dvb/adapter$i/*
done

That is all I do, in fact the rc.local was copied from FC6 to FC7 and I
did nothing else.

The next thing to do is to install and run kaffeine, select your local
transmitter i.e. uk-Wenvoe and let it do a scan.

You can use mplayer too, but I really find it much easier to just use
kaffeine.

If you need any more help, just ask away.

HTH Phil