[pvrusb2] WinTV-HVR-1950 will not load firmware

[Mike Isely]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Mike Isely wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Michael Krufky wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Mike Isely <isely at isely.net> wrote:
> 
>    [...]
> 
> > >
> > > The problem he's describing looks a lot like the FX2 firmware is not
> > > correct.  That has nothing to do with tuner / demod components.  Ken
> > > e-mailed me directly 2 days ago with other issues involving firmware
> > > extraction - I just hadn't replied yet (I did a few minutes ago
> > > however).  There are a number of avenues to chase to get that FX2
> > > firmware straightened out.  I will followup on this later tonight once I
> > > have the right pieces in front of me to help.
> > 
> > Mike,
> > 
> > Are you sure this isn't the "dont disconnect from usb" problem that
> > you fixed a few months ago?
> 
> I'm not sure of anything at the moment :-)
> 
> But given what I've seen in the past it smells like bad firmware.  The 
> key symptom is that it didn't come back to life for him after the FX2 
> firmware was reloaded - and then when he let Windows load the firmware 
> he got a lot farther.
> 
> A little voice is telling me that Hauppauge has probably updated the 
> driver CD and that this is (at least temporarily) complicating the 
> firmware part of the setup process.
> 
>   -Mike

Some followup info on this...

Hauppauge definitely has a new driver package out and fwextract.pl 
doesn't know how to find the FX2 firmware within it.  I scanned the 
package for instances of previous FX2 firmware and found none - so the 
FX2 firmware apparently has also changed.  Ken realized this and 
attempted to use the manual extraction process documented on the pvrusb2 
web site in an attempt to generate new signatures for fwextract.pl.  
It's the FX2 firmware from that process that he loaded that is the issue 
- it doesn't work.

Ken e-mailed me the new signatures and I used that to obtain the new FX2 
firmware here from that same driver package.  I tested that firmware 
image on a known working setup, and it failed.

I have a really hard time thinking that Hauppauge is distributing broken 
FX2 firmware, and the fact that he got further after letting Windows 
load the FX2 firmware for him tells me that the problem is likely not 
the firmware but something that might have gone awry during the manual 
extraction process.  I'm talking to Ken about that now and hopefully we 
can get it resolved.  In the mean time, you can still directly fetch the 
a working FX2 firmware image using the link that Mike Krufky posted 
earlier today:

http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr1950/v4l-pvrusb2-73xxx-01.fw

I've also verified that this particular firmware image is a known 
working image for the pvrusb2 driver.

The pvrusb2 web site also talks about alternatively fetching a firmware 
tarball from ivtvdriver.org - I don't maintain that tarball so I don't 
really have any control over what is in it.  Hans Verkuil had previously 
obtained permission from Hauppauge to distribute firmware for Hauppauge 
products via ivtvdriver.org.  Unfortunately that tarball lacks the 
particular FX2 image needed for HVR-1950 devices so it's not an option 
here :-(

I expect that it should not take long to work with Ken to get 
fwextract.pl fully "trained" on the latest Hauppauge driver package.

  -Mike