Capture card order and reboots

[rz888951]

Config:
Ubuntu 7.04 running sage 6.19
1xpvr150
1xfusion HDTV 5 lite

Problem:
I've noticed that capture card order is not persistent through reboots. What is video0 now may become video1 after the next reboot. This of course doesn't make Sage real happy. From reading various forums it sounds like this is a Linux "feature" and one must use UDEV rules to overcome the issue.

So the question is what is the best way to handle this(other than never reboot )? Can sage use symlinked devices setup with UDEV rules?

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by rz888951

Config:
Ubuntu 7.04 running sage 6.19
1xpvr150
1xfusion HDTV 5 lite

Problem:
I've noticed that capture card order is not persistent through reboots. What is video0 now may become video1 after the next reboot. This of course doesn't make Sage real happy. From reading various forums it sounds like this is a Linux "feature" and one must use UDEV rules to overcome the issue.

So the question is what is the best way to handle this(other than never reboot )? Can sage use symlinked devices setup with UDEV rules?

I have the same problem - one of my cards uses the S-Video from a STB, the others tune the cable directly. If the cards come up in the wrong order, the STB cable is attached to the "wrong" card from SageTV's perspective. I've been ignoring the problem so far.

As far as using udev rules - I did a lot of googling and the description on this page seemed to be one of the more useful I found.

Symlinks should work, as long as you can identify the cards uniquely.

But, like you, I have HDTV and non-HDTV cards. My HDTV card (a pcHDTV 5500, but it should be similar) does have a /dev/videoX device that shows up, but I think you really want to suppress that. The IVTV device that shows up as /dev/videoX is NOT the HD tuner, the HD tuner appears as /dev/dvb/adaptor0.

Side note: the IVTV videoX device on the HD card doesn't have a hardware MPEG encoder, so the CPU would have to do the encoding. I don't know if handing a non-MPEG source is supported by IVTV or on SageTV under Linux. I was never able to see anything on that device.

To get things working (I am running Ubuntu 7.04 also) with my pcHDTV 5500, I had to do two things:

1. Force the DVB driver (cx88-dvb in my case) to load (so the /dev/dvb/adaptor0 appears). (I don't know why this didn't show up automatically, everything else did in Ubuntu.) In /etc/modules, add the line:

cx88-dvb

2. Force suppress the cx8800 driver (so that the /dev/videoX device doesn't appear). In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, add the line:

blacklist cx8800

However, I think the Dvico Fusion HDTV 5 Lite (similar to the pcHDTV HD-2000, apparantly) uses an older chipset than the pcHDTV HD-5500 so the driver names you need to specify might be different.

If you only have those 2 cards, suppressing the videoX device from the HD card might solve your problem because you won't have multiple /dev/videoX devices so the load order won't matter.

Hope that helps,

John

[bcjenkins]

jp -

Thanks for the blacklist tip, it's the same for Gentoo, although I had to create the directory then run

echo blacklist bt878 >> /etc/modules.d/blacklist && update-modules force

Bummer* The dvb-bt8xx depends bt878.

FTR - I am using Fusion5 Lite which runs dvb-bt8xx and I had to add this to /etc/modulesautoload.d/kernel-2.6

echo dvb-bt8xx >> /etc/modulesautoload.d/kernel-2.6

[rz888951]

John,

Thanks for the reply. I haven't tried your suggestion yet, but will try. I stumbled upon another possibility for anyone else.

Using the link below

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/list...v/users/274420

I found that IVTV has parameters that can be used during the loading of the module to set the videoX number for good.

I added:
options ivtv ivtv_first_minor=2

to /etc/modprobe.d/options and now my PVR150 is always set to /dev/video2.