I recently got a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 (a TV tuner, video recorder and FM receiver) because I read it was well supported on GNU/Linux. The following post explains how I installed it on a Fedora Core 9. If you want to install it with another Linux distribution, some information may vary but most of the following steps will be exactly the same.

First connect the USB device, the list of USB devices shows my system has recognised it:

[root@localhost ~]# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 2040:2900 Hauppauge
...
[root@localhost ~]# dmesg
usbcore: registered new interface driver pvrusb2
pvrusb2: Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 MPEG2 Encoder/Tuner : V4L in-tree version
pvrusb2: Debug mask is 31 (0x1f)
firmware: requesting v4l-pvrusb2-29xxx-01.fw
pvrusb2: ***WARNING*** Device fx2 controller firmware seems to be missing.
pvrusb2: Did you install the pvrusb2 firmware files in their proper location?
pvrusb2: request_firmware unable to locate fx2 controller file v4l-pvrusb2-29xxx-01.fw
pvrusb2: Failure uploading firmware1
pvrusb2: Device initialization was not successful.
pvrusb2: Giving up since device microcontroller firmware appears to be missing.


Although my tuner is fully recognised, the system needs a firmware in order to make it work. Where is the firmware? A quick search on a well-known search engine redirects us to Mike Isely’s website where he explains how to get the driver (Mike actually also wrote the driver for this TV tuner). Although I got the CD with drivers for Windows, I prefer to use the latest driver that can be found on the Hauppage support website. Mike also writes you can get the driver from the ivtv project.

So I uncompress the driver in the “win_driver” directory and launch Mike Isely’s fwextract.pl script:

[jepoirrier@localhost hauppauge]$ mkdir win_driver
[jepoirrier@localhost hauppauge]$ unzip hauppauge_cd_3.4d1.zip -d win_driver/
[jepoirrier@localhost hauppauge]$ ./fwextract.pl

The script extracted 4 drivers (2 decoders and 2 encoders) and dmesg already told me the two I need: v4l-pvrusb2-29xxx-01.fw and v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw (as encoder). To know where to put these files, check a little bit on the web (this depends on your GNU/Linux distribution). On the Fedora Core 9, it’s in /lib/firmware, so:

[root@localhost hauppauge]# cp v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw /lib/firmware
[root@localhost hauppauge]# cp v4l-pvrusb2-29xxx-01.fw /lib/firmware

Unplug your USB cable, re-plug it and a dmesg should give you a long list of what your system detected, the most interesting part being the last line where it request the firmware and doesn’t stop: firmware: requesting v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw 🙂 Now check your video devices and you should have an additional /dev/videox:

[root@localhost hauppauge]# ls /dev/vid*
/dev/video /dev/video0 /dev/video1

In my case, /dev/video1 is the one I need …

Now, how to watch TV? TVTIME seems to be good but, unfortunately, my video card driver doesn’t support hardware YUY2 overlay (I have an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 2600 with the open source radeon driver). No problem: mplayer /dev/video1 shows a very beautiful snow. Now I need an antenna or a cable to connect to my tuner …

• Open Source
• User Interface