Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Hauppage USB live 2 on Linux

I've used the USB live2 stick for displaying analog (tv) video on Linux, when I was still on Ubuntu Lucid. Things worked ok back then, so kept the card. Then in a flash of non-inspiration, the "update-manager" appeared and I upgraded to the most recent version. The drivers immediately stopped working and these were pretty special at the time, because I compiled them to get it to work.

I use this stick in combination with a a GoPro HD camera, which in the same timeline I did the Ubuntu upgrade was upgraded to new firmware, which allowed it to stream TV out at the same time as recording video. Great feature! Unfortunately, since the new firmware allowed configuration settings for PAL, I decided to change that along with it. This appeared the real problem for the driver problems.

On Windows the driver is getting its output and all the lights work. So I figured it must've been a driver problem. Turns out that when I configure the GoPro camera to use the NTSC standard instead, I am getting output on Ubuntu Maverick and a decent one at that. For some reason, it appears as if the combination of the driver with PAL and GoPro output is incompatible with one another.

So, if you have a GoPro, attempt to use this together with USB Live2, try changing settings to NTSC instead and see if you get output that way. By the way, I'm using this in combination with an analog video receiver and yes, the same problems apply!

2 comments:

Godwin said...

Hi,
How did you get this Hauppage USB live 2 to work on LInux?
I'm trying it with ubuntu 11.04 and its not working for some reason.
I'm testing it with kamoso. It displays the device name. BUt, it doesn't show the video. It's just black and the light on the USB live 2 also doesn't glow. I would appreciate any pointers.
Thank you.

Gerard Toonstra said...

I upgraded from Lucid to Maverick and it stopped working for me as well. Look for "interface -71 or -2" errors somewhere in dmesg.log after you plug it in or when you try to display video.

I use this primarily on a little netbook and reverted to Ubuntu Lucid (10.04?) using the private repository again.

During my testing I also found that the driver doesn't like the PAL format very much. I use a camera that I can switch between the two. NTSC works much better than PAL (less crashes, etc.).

Other than that, I have not tested on Natty yet, so can't give you pointers for newer versions. If you use PAL, try NTSC (or a camera that works with that), to see if that improves things.