Hauppauge USB Live 2 & Ubuntu

I'm running Ubuntu and purchased a USB Live 2 stick from Hauppauge to visualize some direct composite video coming from a 5.8Ghz receiver. This video is transmitted from an RC plane to see what's going on up there on a netbook. I'm not flying it FPV for lack of goggles and because I want to keep track of where the plane is. Basically, the intention is to put the family behind the netbook to see what the plane sees and I'll stare at the dot in the distance.

The USB stick arrived yesterday in the mail and after plugging it in, nothing happened. USB devices get recognized by their ID's and as soon as you register a driver for it, the kernel will visit all eligible drivers to see if one wants to step up to communicate with the device. Apparently the support for USB live 2 is not available in the stock distribution of Lucid yet. After searching around I suddenly hit a post made on the 3rd of August (sic!) that support for USB Live 2 was just completed on a development branch in v4l2. So the day before I got the stick development just finished with the first version of the driver.

Blog: http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=1445&cpage=1#comment-1632

I managed to install this on both my netbook and general PC. These are a 32-bit Lucid Lynx distribution on a Samsung N210 and a 64-bit installation on a more powerful machine with ATI HD5850 and i7 920. You should make sure that you're not holding back any linux packages, since I got screen corrruptions with kernel 2.6.32-23. The latest version now is 2.6.32-24 and there it worked (or it was something else, who knows?). After the clean install, you need to grab gcc, do an update/upgrade of all packages and make sure the latest kernel headers are present:

> apt-get install gcc
> apt-get install linux-headers-generic    ( <-- ensure it's the latest & greatest @ 2.6.32-24 )

Then I used the entire v4l2 source tree available here (at 05-Aug-2010 that is, things may change rapidly here)

> hg clone http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/polaris4
> cd polaris4
/polaris4> sudo -s
/polaris4> make

( then edit v4l/.config:
1. find CONFIG_DVB_FIREDTV=m
2. change this into:
3. CONFIG_DVB_FIREDTV=n
4. (notice the n instead of m at the end, that's all).
5. This essentially deactivates the build of a problematic module, so if you have a problem there
  you can deactivate it.

/polaris4> make
( yes again ).

If all went well:
/polaris4> make install

And then reboot. The reboot will ensure you're not using any old drivers. The rollback procedure for this is to reinstall the linux-image-...version... you were using. That will replace all your modules with the stock Ubuntu Lucid distribution.

Any time you get a new linux-image installed, you have to do another make, make install in this custom directory to overwrite the module files again. Remember that!

As you can tell, after doing this some video-related things may not work properly. For my netbook, I'm only going to use it in the field and some simple stuff. So far things haven't broken, so that should be relatively safe. It looks pretty stable so far.

I've noticed that the image when there's no signal may be plain blue. That is usually the case when the signal hasn't been tuned at all, but in this card you must ensure there's a video signal going into it.

The USB Live2 is a great little gadget with quite good image quality and zero lag on the Linux drivers. In Windows it's possible you get lag up to 3 seconds even, but that's because your driver must be configured to use "GAME" mode (if you're flying or gaming with this that is, otherwise it doesn't matter too much).

In order to visualize things, I now use tvtime (apt-get install tvtime). There's a handy configuration XML file in /etc/tvtime.xml where you can make all the default settings. The coolness about this utility is that you can change a large number of settings without restarting and adjust the image quality, brightness or contrast itself. Great for outdoors flying and getting a bit more out of the display.

The USB Live 2 uses the cx231xx kernel driver.