# AverMedia AverTVHybrid+FM Volar - will it ever..<SOLVED> ;-)

## Januszzz

Hi,

I happily bought Avermedia AverTV Hybrid+FM Volar. Its a usb stick which should work with both analog and digital TV. In Poland I use analog (DVB-T maybe on Euro 2012)

On its homepage the model has big sticker "Linux Compatible" and AverMedia screams that they support several distros. But later, when downloading drivers (from here: http://www.avermedia.com/EN/default.aspx?TYPE=test.htm&PT=downloadD1&tv_TCAT_POS=0&CATNO0=D&IDX=2.1&CNT=1&CATNO1=D2&UCN=BAB4C&PID=471071067-1556) one can read this "The AVerMedia Linux Driver may be "alpha", "beta", "development", pre-release, untested, and/or not fully tested and may contain errors that could cause failures or loss of data, be incomplete or contain inaccuracies".

Well... the driver kills kernel 2.6.22-gentoo-r8 (and vanilla 2.6.22.9 also, all on x86_64). Possibly contains "inaccuracies"...

Drivers compile fine, create devices:

```

usb 4-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6

usb 4-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

A828 registered V4L2 device video1[video]

A828 registered V4L2 device video2[audio]

A828 registered V4L2 device radio0[radio]

A828 registered V4L2 device vbi0[vbi]

DVB: registering new adapter (A828[0] DVB-T).

A828[0] DVB-T registered DVB adapter 0

DVB: registering frontend 0 (A828[0] DVB-T)...

```

But when I try to use video1 (video0 is my Syntek camera in Asus notebook) I get kernel panic which I can eventually send in jpeg for somebody interested in debugging...

Any hint what I could do next? Sell this card back or wait for anything more? I thought about changing kernel to those "supported", but it appear that is not an option because iwlwifi drivers for my iwl4965 Intel wifi card just do not work then. Anyway on Ubuntu the driver fails to compile (but I didn't investigate it hard yet).

lsusb:

```

Bus 004 Device 006: ID 07ca:a828 AVerMedia Technologies, Inc.

```

To attract attention I'm posting real Blue(ack) Screen Of Death: http://www.uni.opole.pl/janusz/panic.jpg

Yeah.

JanuszLast edited by Januszzz on Tue Oct 02, 2007 6:25 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## bjlockie

Ask Avermedia and complain that they shouldn't advertise Linux support unless it works.

I'd return it and by a supported card.

http://linuxtv.org/

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## Januszzz

Yeah, 

today I gave the card back to the store I bought it. Said that it it was Linux incompatible, they were somewhat stunned but accepted.

What say next...

...solved   :Very Happy: 

To any interested: this card is not really supported, drivers by Avermedia are too bad to accept its use!

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## daithi

Howdy ho,

I got one of these bad boys.

Sad to say that it did not work with driver versions 0.01-BETA, 0.03-BETA and 0.04-BETA.

The first two caused kernel panics ... the module would load, but crash when the device was plugged in. The worst thing that happened to me with 0.04 was the USB subsystem would crash. Had to reboot to get it going again.

But I'm happy to report that 0.07 driver seems to work. I only noticed this was available about three weeks ago. I have used it on the 2.6.22-r1, -r5 and suspend2-r2 kernels.

Download  from here.

With the module loaded and device plugged in it still seems to crash MythTV. But I am able to get a (pretty shit) picture with tvtime. Change tvtime to use custom frequencies first to get all channels. Then run the tvtime-scanner. Then fire tvtime back up and tune into a channel. You probably will only get a picture with no sound. To get audio leave tvtime running whilst tunned into a channel and then go to the aver tools directory, build the tools and execute the ./audio binary.

Not an ideal solution, but at least my A828 is no longer a paper weight.

Also noteworthy here is the aver tools. They are quite simple. Especially the tvplayer, which just init's the device and executes xtv and the audio binary. Might be worth while to just hack the tvplayer tool a little and use just that instead of tvtime.

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## Januszzz

Congrats! 

I also tried those drivers (0.07) without luck... I had oops with any app I was launching.

I used x86_64, and you? Anyway, as I said I already returned the card so its only informational.  

Janusz

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## daithi

Ty!

I am currently using the x86 32bit version.

Unfortunately for me however, I also recently moved to Gnome for the eyecandy. And tvtime won't launch because of not enough video memory  :Sad:  (I've given X 262144 and still not enough). So I have to go back to fluxbox to watch TV.

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## kfiaciarka

for me this card does not work so far. It is maybe because of laptop camera which is default /dev/video0. Moreover changing colour depth to 16 bit is annoying. A828 tool tv-player is complaining about audio:/ I tried kdetv but it segfaults. Now I know what does it mean to be "linux compatibile" ... :[

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## daithi

 *kfiaciarka wrote:*   

> for me this card does not work so far. It is maybe because of laptop camera which is default /dev/video0. Moreover changing colour depth to 16 bit is annoying. A828 tool tv-player is complaining about audio:/ I tried kdetv but it segfaults. Now I know what does it mean to be "linux compatibile" ... :[

 

I found the best way to get this card working is to first get it working with the tv-player ... keep in mind that the tvplayer app can launch and everything will work but there will possible not be a channel on the frequency the tvplayer tunes in to.

What you could do is a) change the camera from /dev/video0 or b) open up tvplayer.c and audio.c and change /dev/video0 and /dev/video1 in each file respectively to the new device. Edit: Of course then you will have to recompile ... 'make' again should do it.

dmesg - what does the kernel tell you when you insert the module, or load tvplayer? Also, what is the output of tvplayer and audio?

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## kfiaciarka

hi  :Smile: 

dmesg shows me:

```

nf_ct_ras: decoding error: out of range

nf_ct_ras: decoding error: out of range

nf_ct_ras: decoding error: out of range

nf_ct_ras: decoding error: out of range

Symbol usb_deregister is being used by a non-GPL module, which will not be allowed in the future

Please see the file Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt in the kernel source tree for more details.

Symbol usb_register_driver is being used by a non-GPL module, which will not be allowed in the future

Please see the file Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt in the kernel source tree for more details.

USB Hybrid+FM Volar version 0.07 loaded

usbcore: registered new interface driver USB Hybrid+FM Volar

usb 2-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4

usb 2-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

A828 registered V4L2 device video1[video]

A828 registered V4L2 device video2[audio]

A828 registered V4L2 device radio0[radio]

A828 registered V4L2 device vbi0[vbi]

DVB: registering new adapter (A828[0] DVB-T).

A828[0] DVB-T registered DVB adapter 0

DVB: registering frontend 0 (A828[0] DVB-T)...
```

but tvtime or other apps often get segfaults like this:

```

tvtime-scanner: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x4020

 [<b0155089>] __alloc_pages+0x239/0x2f0

 [<b016c585>] __slab_alloc+0x155/0x5d0

 [<f1ed04d5>] SysKMalloc+0x35/0x90 [a828]

 [<b016d10b>] __kmalloc+0x7b/0x80

 [<f1ed04d5>] SysKMalloc+0x35/0x90 [a828]

 [<f1ed04d5>] SysKMalloc+0x35/0x90 [a828]

 [<f1ee5b89>] _ZN15CA828DirectFeed9SubmitUrbEv+0x29/0xfc [a828]

 [<f1ee5984>] _ZN15CA828DirectFeed12IsocCompleteEPv+0x0/0x12a [a828]

 [<f1ee5c74>] _ZN15CA828DirectFeed15StartFeedAnalogEv+0x18/0x52 [a828]

 [<f1ee50cd>] _ZN14CA828StrmVideo10HWSetStateE14stream_state_t+0x55/0xa8 [a828]

 [<f1ed4863>] _ZN9CStrmBase8StreamOnEv+0x61/0x70 [a828]

 [<f1ee3c66>] _ZN10CA828Video6IOCtrlEPvS0_S0_jS0_+0x384/0x41e [a828]

 [<f1ed3c9f>] CVideoDevBaseIOCtrl+0x23/0x2a [a828]

 [<f1ed22a6>] video_do_ioctl+0x36/0x50 [a828]

 [<f13e7225>] video_usercopy+0xc5/0x220 [videodev]

 [<b0159f4f>] vma_prio_tree_insert+0x1f/0x50

 [<b01603d3>] vma_link+0xb3/0x100

 [<b01611bd>] do_mmap_pgoff+0x52d/0x7a0

 [<f1ed2268>] video_ioctl+0x18/0x20 [a828]

 [<f1ed2270>] video_do_ioctl+0x0/0x50 [a828]

 [<f1ed2250>] video_ioctl+0x0/0x20 [a828]

 [<b017c9f4>] do_ioctl+0x84/0xc0

 [<f1ed2250>] video_ioctl+0x0/0x20 [a828]

 [<b017cc51>] vfs_ioctl+0x221/0x2b0

 [<b017cd3d>] sys_ioctl+0x5d/0x70

 [<b01041be>] sysenter_past_esp+0x5f/0x85

 =======================

Mem-info:

DMA per-cpu:

CPU    0: Hot: hi:    0, btch:   1 usd:   0   Cold: hi:    0, btch:   1 usd:   0

CPU    1: Hot: hi:    0, btch:   1 usd:   0   Cold: hi:    0, btch:   1 usd:   0

Normal per-cpu:

CPU    0: Hot: hi:  186, btch:  31 usd: 170   Cold: hi:   62, btch:  15 usd:  58

CPU    1: Hot: hi:  186, btch:  31 usd:  29   Cold: hi:   62, btch:  15 usd:   5

Active:134351 inactive:70163 dirty:3551 writeback:0 unstable:0

 free:3470 slab:39061 mapped:17064 pagetables:679 bounce:0

DMA free:4028kB min:60kB low:72kB high:88kB active:2660kB inactive:0kB present:16256kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no

lowmem_reserve[]: 0 999
```

I managed to run tvtime with some vision  :Smile:  but none of channels is watchable and all of them look almoust the same.

There is no sound  :Smile: 

Did you manage to run this thing in 24 bit mode? why is only 16 needed  :Sad: 

----------

## daithi

Hello,

dmesg looks good I think.

Pity about that segfault.

Like I said in another post in this thread, to get this working I had to:

 .:. Change tvtime to use custom frequencies first to get all channels.

 .:. Then run the tvtime-scanner.

 .:. Then run tvtime and tune to a channel (with no sound).

 .:. Next go to A828-tools/, (make) and execute ./audio

Now you will have a (pretty shit) picture with sound!

If you are used to real DVB and HD TV and HDDVD/Bluray for your movies and all that, you will definitely think this picture is unwatchable, especially for sport, when the action is fast. However I am as happy as a pig in poo that this device is no longer just taking up space and can actually kinda sorta justabout give me some TV on my laptop!

I always run in 16-bit mode I'm afraid, my "graphics card" won't support 24-bits of colour at its max resolution.

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## kfiaciarka

What do you mean by custom frequencies?

```
tvtime-configure -f custom
```

 ?

Ok:)

But I can't get audio to work:

```

~/A828-tools $ ./audio

VIDIOC_REQBUFS: Device or resource busy

zero size to map
```

And I hate those green flashes :/

----------

