My favorite application for watching analogue TV is tvtime. Unfortunately it has not been updated for a few years now. As is the rule for unmaintained code, the upstream version finally is no longer compatible with Linux kernel 2.6.38. The V4L1 API has now been removed after being deprecated for a really long time.
But Devin Heitmueller from KernelLabs invested some time to remove the parts from tvtime that still needed the old API. The source is available from this mercurial repo.
hg clone http://www.kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/tvtime
cd tvtime
autoreconf -i -f
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-nls
make
make install
There is also a report in Gentoo’s Bugzilla with a new ebuild attached, but I haven’t tried that. Installing the new patched tvtime to /usr/local works for now.
I am all ears if anyone can recommend an alternative to tvtime. I know about xawtv, but the interface is poor and offers less features than tvtime.
After the upgrade to Linux kernel 2.6.38, the boot process for my machine hang quite long while Populating /dev with existing devices through uevents. After investigations it turns out that the cx88 driver used for my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1300 tv card was not correctly converted to the new mutex system while removing the BKL. This is being tracked in the kernel bugzilla as bug #31962.
Fortunately, there is a patch attached to the mentioned bug report which resolves the problem:
cd /usr/src/linux
wget -O cx88-2.6.38-fix-driver-deadlocks.patch 'https://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=53722'
patch -p1 < cx88-2.6.38-fix-driver-deadlocks.patch
[Edited on 2011-04-23: replaced patch 52902 with 53722]
After applying the patch, build and install your kernel as usual. But there are still some more problems with 2.6.38 related to tvtime. See also my next post.
I do not follow kernel development close enough to know in which git tree this has to show up to confirm if it has been merged yet. Hopefully this patch will make it into the next kernel release.
