[pvrusb2] back-end application

[Mike Isely]

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Abe Shan wrote:

> True, point well taken.
> 
> However, is there a way I can independently test the driver without getting
> into all these backend issue, just so that I am sure the driver is working
> well. Currently, I only see snow and no picture. Is there an easy way I can
> flip a couple of channels and see that it is working.

Good question.

The fact that you are seeing snow is a good indication actually.  In order 
to see snow the entire video pathway must be working.  The only problem 
left should be just tuning.  Several things you can do:

If you have a video source that can produce composite or s-video, you can 
use that and bypass the tuner.  Obviously this doesn't help you get the 
tuner working but it will tell you positively that everything else is 
healthy.  If you have a DVD player, VCR, camcorder, etc laying around you 
can plug that into the device's composite or s-video input and try that.  
In this case I'd run "mplayer /dev/video0" (or /dev/video1 or whatever) 
and then use the sysfs interface (see the docs; it's really easy) to 
change the input to composite or s-video as appropriate.

If you know the actual frequency of a local station, you can also use 
sysfs to input that frequency directly, in which case you can also use 
mplayer to test the tuner.  But admittedly this is a little hard if you 
don't know any good frequencies to use.

Another thing I'd try is xawtv-4.x.  You'll need to build it which is a 
bit of a pain but it's still less error prone than getting MythTV working 
and certainly there are fewer things in xawtv that can go wrong since it 
is inherently simpler.  Remember when you configure xawtv to be sure to 
note that it has found viable mpeg2 and mp3 decoding libraries otherwise 
it won't be able to play the stream.  Once you have xawtv configured and 
built then you can use it to scan for live TV channels.  Note: When you do 
the scan and it complains about not finding /dev/vbi0, just specify 
/dev/null for that - the scan will work fine.

If you're not sure that you have xawtv configured / built properly, well 
you could do the earlier trick with a DVD player (or VCR etc) & mplayer to 
gain confidence in the driver and THEN do the same thing with xawtv.  Once 
you have that working then you can try tuning with xawtv.

  -Mike

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