MythTV Hardware- Hauppauge USB Live-2

From Free Knowledge Base- The DUCK Project: information for everyone
Revision as of 23:37, 18 February 2015 by Admin (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search

The Hauppauge USB Live-2 is a USB 2.0 capture device without a TV tuner. It has both composite and S-video inputs. It also has stereo audio inputs. It has never been fully supported in Linux, however, new kernels have some degree of support. The chipset in the device has been revised at least twice. Success with the device may depend on which encoder chip is present.

driver and system recognition

The driver will be loaded by the kernel during boot. When the system is up, use the command lsusb to see the device.

Example: 

# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:3074 ASMedia Technology Inc. 
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 09da:0006 A4 Tech Co., Ltd Optical Mouse WOP-35 / Trust 450L Optical Mouse
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 2040:c200 Hauppauge 
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 174c:2074 ASMedia Technology Inc. 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Here the device can be seen as Device 005 with the label "Hauppauge."

You will have better luck connecting this device to a USB 2.0 port than a USB 3.0 port. There is a bug in the linux kernel known as the "USB Shutdown Bug" which impacts machines that have both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports. It is recommended that you disable support for USB 3.0 in the system BIOS.

If you are specifically impacted by the "USB Shutdown Bug" you will notice errors in "dmesg" such as: 

xhci_hcd ERROR Transfer event TRB DMA ptr not part of current TD

You may observe no video, green video, or flickering partial video in your video player. USB ports may become inactive. If you have a USB mouse connected to the system you may lose use of the mouse as the USB ports will become non-functional until reboot. Again, disabling SuperSpeed or USB 3.0 in BIOS will often serve as a workaround.

testing video input

Once in Xfce you can test to see if you are able to receive video from a composite source via the USB Live-2. For basic testing purposes mplayer serves well. You will want to make sure that the driver loaded by using lsusb as described earlier. A device should have been created in /dev as /dev/video0 or if you have other capture cards it could be /dev/video1 or higher. Confirm which video device belongs to your USB Live 2. For our example we will assume /dev/video0

From the command prompt in a console window type the following: 

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:norm=NTSC:width=720

mplayer will complain that there is no TV Tuner (because of the -tv switch) however this will not prevent video from being displayed. Specifying width= can be substituted with a width you prefer based on your resolution. You should now see video from your source.

Please note that the indicator lights on the USB Live 2 device will not illuminate nor will they blink during testing.

testing audio input

Install PulseAudio Volume Control. 

apt-get install pavucontrol
Retrieved from "https://wiki.robotz.com/index.php?title=MythTV_Hardware-_Hauppauge_USB_Live-2&oldid=10261"