[pvrusb2] WinTV HVR-1975 (with official drivers) failing to load firmware

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 2:30 AM,  <isely at isely.net> wrote:
>
> Ian:
>
> Wait a second.  Now I'm confused.  Are you or are not using the pvrusb2
> driver?  The error you quoted was definitely phrasing that would have
> come from the pvrusb2 driver.  If you're using something else entirely
> different I'd be VERY curious know why the resemblence.
>
> Also - to others here - I'm confused about something else.  This sounds
> like we're talking about 3 drivers:
>
> 1. The pvrusb2 driver, in the kernel mainline.
>
> 2. Something on the Hauppauge web site, apparently freely accessible.
>
> 3. Something from Hauppauge that can't be acquired without an NDA.
>
> Is this correct?  Anyone, chime in.

I think part of the issue is that Hauppauge has many
different devices.

For (3), there have been rumors for years that Hauppauge
either had (or re-licensed from one of the few competent
vendors for such codes) various drivers for their devices
(some of which have nothing to do with the pvrusb2 series)
to support vendors who needed official support (not only
in Linux, but other OS's).  At one point a NDA license
was needed for any of their new chipset design devices
(and presumably payment of fees).

Hauppauge had posted some drivers for some of their
devices which clearly had proprietary licenses in the
headers.  When I saw such a license, I stopped reading
the code (and have not gone back to look at anything
newer).

At some point Hauppauge offered their "freely
downloadable" patch for some (different?) set of devices,
which from other discussions is not merge-able upstream
(at least not in the current state; I have no idea about
whether licensing is part of that).

Lastly, the 1975 is more like two devices than one.
It has both the ATSC and DVB demods on board,
and likely (although I have no personal experience)
needs two sets of firmware blobs (one for each
demod)?