Troubleshooting

Testing Capture

• After the driver is loaded, you can test it by doing a simple capture

  • cat /dev/video0 > ~/test.mpg

  Let this go for about 5sec and then press ctrl-c
• Attempt to playback this file in a media player and see if there is content in it.

Diagnosing Problems

• Check dmesg to see if there are any errors loading firmware or anything like that.

dmesg 

Look in between the two blocks for START IVTV and END IVTV. If you see any errors about "unable to load firmware" or "missing module" or anything like that, go into #ubuntu and see if you can grab some help or post on the forums.

Error Loading Firmware

I had issues with the firmware trying to be load, turned out the softlinks in /lib/firmware needed to be actual copies of the file (if they are softlinks for you).

sudo cp v4l-cx2341x-dec.fw ivtv-fw-dec.bin

Resource allocation errors

There are two possible solutions to resource allocation problems:

• Be sure that you have enabled APIC on your machine's BIOS. This will guarantee enough resources are allocated for the device.

  See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=284041 for more information.

• Add  vmalloc=192m  to your kernel boot parameters. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the vmalloc=192 to the end of your kernel line:

  • title           Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-server
    root            (hd0,0)
    kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-server root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash vmalloc=192m
    initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-server
    quiet
    savedefault
    boot