[pvrusb2] remote, radio and other issues

[Mike Isely]

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, leonardo wrote:

> Hallo everybody,
> First of all thanks to mike and all the others who are spending a lot of time 
> to lively support this driver. Then, I've a few issues to solve...
> 
> first is that I've configuret irexec to handle the remote of the pvrusb2, but it often 
> happens that pushing a botton in the remote is received with a 1 step lag, that is, 
> the action associated with the last button pushed is  executed. So if I push volUp for 
> three times and then volDown, I have 4 times volUp action executed.
> Do some others experiece the same or it might be a problem of my configuration?

I have not seen that problem.  However (and I imagine this doesn't help 
much) the only involvement of the pvrusb2 driver in IR is at the very 
lowest level: The pvrusb2 driver just provides an I2C control path to 
the IR receiver chip; the actual driver for the IR receiver comes from 
elsewhere (the lirc package or V4L itself depending on how you have 
things set up).  For 24xxx devices, the pvrusb2 driver also emulates 
the presence of the IR receiver chip but the outward result is the 
same.

> 
> then, I'd like to set up a media center using an Xbox, but I've seen there are some 
> issues with that. Are the issues still present and relevant?

A long time ago, when I first started working on this driver, the first 
user of it wanted to host the device off of an xbox.  It didn't work.  
After 2 nights of back-and-forth over e-mail, we discovered that a 
problem in the I2C software supplied with the xbox Linux distro (xebian, 
IIRC) caused that I2C software to get confused when it saw the "extra" 
I2C bus appear in the system that is inside the PVR USB2 hardware.  This 
confusion resulted in a dangling pointer dereference and a kernel oops 
and subsequent other bits of badness.  I created a patch that modified 
the xbox I2C software to behave better and that fixed the problem.  That 
was in Feb 2005.  I don't have an xbox so I can't test here; all I can 
do is supply the patch to whomever asks and hope things haven't changed 
too much since then.  I think I last sent out the patch a few months ago 
and that person reported success.  If someone would like to contact the 
authors of xebian (or whoever is maintaining its I2C drivers), feel free 
but I've just been too busy.

So the short summary is that the pvrusb2 driver will work on xbox, but 
it takes some tweaking of a few xbox I2C drivers first.


> 
> I'm having problems with FM tuner, I can read from the device with mplayer and use cat to set
> the channels, but I have no luck with kradio.. again is this I should work out with 
> my configuration?

You will not be able to play the audio through kradio.  However you 
should be able to use kradio to tune the device and then another app 
(like mplayer) to play the audio.  Also realize that the PVR USB2 
hardware uses a separate F-connector for FM radio reception.  If you 
still have the coax connected to the TV input F-connector, then the 
radio won't receive much :-)


> 
> I'm using xubuntu with 2.6.17, version 20070207 of the driver and a 24xxx device.

The radio should work with this config, AFAIK.

  -Mike


-- 
                        |         Mike Isely          |     PGP fingerprint
     Spammers Die!!     |                             | 03 54 43 4D 75 E5 CC 92
                        |   isely @ pobox (dot) com   | 71 16 01 E2 B5 F5 C1 E8
                        |                             |