smoe's picture

Hi everyone,

I have a  fileserver appliance with HTS TVHeadend built into it as a streaming tv server.  XBMC clients are the frontends.

I got a new dual tuner card the other day.  It is a PCI card, but the trouble is that it is 2 USB tuners connected via the PCI bus.  The autosuspend USB feature causes problems with one or both tuners dropping out.

I've tried this:

echo -n -1 > /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend

to disable the autosuspsend, but I still had problems with the tuner card flaking out.

I have read that appending options usbcore autosuspend=0 to /etc/modprobe.d/options

will work, but I don't have /etc/modprobe.d/options

Any advice?

Cheers!

Forum: 
Jeremy Davis's picture

I'm a bit of a tinkerer really and hardware is certainly not my specialty. You may be lucky enough to get someone who knows their stuff along to give you a hand, but in the meantime I'd recommend you try on the Ubuntu forums.

If you keep in mind that TKL is based on Ubuntu 10.04 (as I've probably said before) then you should find plenty of info and if you start a new post, hopefully even get one of the helpful people over there to give you some pointers.

In other news...: I finally gave up on that other TV card I had and bought a couple of dual-tuner ones pretty cheap (that I read run well on Linux). I still have problems with reception so the next step will be to get an antenna on the roof, but in the meantime, I will soon be looking to see if I can get the tuners installed and working (even if I can't get much reception). Will have a look at TVheadend as you suggested, but from my online research MythTV looks like a pretty good option too. Have you tried it at all?

smoe's picture

i haven't tried mythtv - but i've heard that some of the setup can be infuriating.  I found tvheadend to be really easy to install.  I haven't mucked around much with any of it's recording or scheduling to date, but it doens't look hard to get along.

My needs for it are simple - it's pretty much just a way to get the tv signal around the house - there's not enough good stuff on free to air tv to bother with all the scheduling nonsense!

I'll give the Ubuntu forums a go, but my searches there haven't been all that fruitful.

Jeremy Davis's picture

I think I'll have a play with MythTV as I like some of the features. From what I've read, with my 2x dual tuners I should (theoretically) be able to watch 4 different channels in 4 different locations or watch 2/record 2 etc. It also seems to have facility to play back previously recorded stuff (or other movies/vid files etc) and seems to be happy to time shift too. I'm not sure how successful it is, but it says on the tin that it can even remove ads as it records! But we'll have to see how we go with all that...!

Regardless of all these features we'll have to see if my hardware will be able to handle it all. I was intending to install it as an OpenVZ guest (PCI passthrough seems to work well with that) on my existing home server, but I doubt that will work (my reading suggests I'll want one CPU core per tuner. I may look at running a secondary backend on my server though to help a bit with CPU load (for transcoding etc).

You are right re not enough good stuff on free to air, but I just can't help myself! I'm keen to see what is possible.

As for Ubuntu forums, I'd suggest posting on the forums yourself. I haven't had a lot of luck when posting regarding TKL stuff, but perhaps if you just say it's an Ubuntu 10.04 server (at least initially) you may have more luck.

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