LIRC and PV-M4500 (TV Excel / PlayTV PixelView Pro TV Card)

Question

Hi all,
I've installed a BT878 TV card, but I've had no luck getting its remote to work. I've found a handful of accounts reporting success with linux and this card, so it must be possible. I'd appreciate some help though, as I'm out of ideas. Hopefully there's an obvious oversight somewhere below!
First, here's /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf, which seems adequate to get the TV card. As you can see, there are plenty of commented options I've tried at various stages. As a rule, the card options were all adequate to drive the TV card, but none of the LIRC related options got me anywhere.
# i2c
#alias char-major-89 i2c-devb
#options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1
#alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
# bttv
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 bttv
# TV Card
options bttv card=70 tuner=38 radio=1
options tuner addr=0x61
# Other options tried with TV Card
#options bttv card=72 tuner=38 radio=1
# options tuner addr=0x61 # and without this
#options bttv card=70 tuner=43 radio=1 automute=0 pll=1
#options bttv card=70 tuner=37 radio=1 pll=1 adc_crush=0
#options tuner addr=0x61
#options bttv card=37 tuner=38
# Other LIRC options attempted
#alias char-major-61 lirc_gpio
#options lirc_gpio gpio_mask=0x3f00 gpio_lock_mask=0x4000 gpio_xor_mask=0 soft_gap=400 sample_rate=12
Here's dmesg, after a reboot with the above configuration:
lirc_dev: IR Remote Control driver registered, major 250
Linux video capture interface: v2.00
IR NEC protocol handler initialized
bttv: driver version 0.9.18 loaded
bttv: using 8 buffers with 2080k (520 pages) each for capture
bttv: Bt8xx card found (0).
bttv 0000:02:07.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22
bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:02:07.0, irq: 22, latency: 64, mmio: 0xd3fff000
bttv0: using: Prolink Pixelview PV-BT878P+ (Rev.4C,8E) [card=70,insmod option]
bttv0: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=009f82ff [init]
bttv0: tuner type=38
IR RC5(x) protocol handler initialized
HDA Intel 0000:00:14.2: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
i2c-core: driver [msp3400] using legacy suspend method
i2c-core: driver [msp3400] using legacy resume method
IR RC6 protocol handler initialized
IR JVC protocol handler initialized
IR Sony protocol handler initialized
nvidia 0000:05:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
nvidia 0000:05:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
vgaarb: device changed decodes: PCI:0000:05:00.0,olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=none:owns=io+mem
NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 275.09.07 Wed Jun 8 14:16:46 PDT 2011
IR LIRC bridge handler initialized
bttv0: audio absent, no audio device found!
i2c-core: driver [tuner] using legacy suspend method
i2c-core: driver [tuner] using legacy resume method
HDA Intel 0000:05:00.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
hda_intel: Disable MSI for Nvidia chipset
HDA Intel 0000:05:00.1: setting latency timer to 64
All bytes are equal. It is not a TEA5767
tuner 1-0060: Tuner -1 found with type(s) Radio TV.
tuner-simple 1-0060: creating new instance
tuner-simple 1-0060: type set to 38 (Philips PAL/SECAM multi (FM1216ME MK3))
bttv0: registered device video0
bttv0: registered device vbi0
bttv0: registered device radio0
bttv0: PLL: 28636363 => 35468950 ..
input: ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input4
firewire_core: created device fw0: GUID 001e8c0000330d06, S400
ok
Registered IR keymap rc-pixelview
input: bttv IR (card=70) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.4/0000:02:07.0/rc/rc0/input5
rc0: bttv IR (card=70) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.4/0000:02:07.0/rc/rc0
ivtv: Start initialization, version 1.4.2
ivtv: End initialization
cx88/0: cx2388x v4l2 driver version 0.0.8 loaded
At the top, you can see that the LIRC device is detected. However, there's no device created with char-major 250 in /dev. There's no 61 either. Thinking this was the problem, I tried a udev.rules file to create an appropriate device:
KERNEL=="event*",SYSFS{vendor}=="0x109e",SYMLINK="lirc0"
After that I had /dev/lirc0 linked to input/event4. Didn't help when I ran commands like:
irrecord -H devinput -d /dev/lirc0 test
irrecord -H devinput -d /dev/input/by-path/pci-0000\:02\:07.0-event-ir test
Didn't help with irw or lirc either. Here's an excerpt from the lirc logs:
lircd: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd
lircd: could not get hardware features
lircd: this device driver does not support the LIRC ioctl interface
lircd: did you mean to use the devinput driver instead of the default driver?
lircd: WARNING: Failed to initialize hardware
lircd: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd
Now, I could give you even more information, but I have a lot of notes and little sense of what else might hold the key. Let me know what you need. A solution or explanation would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I have a K-World TV-Tuner card. I have XP running on my machine. I experienced two aspect of the problem. Driver installation and Hardware/software crashs. The driver problem was correct by removing ALL installed Video and sound drivers and and letting xp reinstall. When the multimedia installation was to occur I force a manual selction of the K-world drivers and works like A champ.
I found that when I moved the card to a slot not shared with the AGP  and WINmodem/or NIC card things were much more stable. Memory timing may have had some bearing as I did adjust it at the time, but after everything settled down It seems to me that my previous comments have had more bearing than not. I have had to reinstall XP on several occassions and my solutions have proven to be stable ones for my hardware configuration.