Cannot scan channels on a VMware guest

[cmaske]

I recently converted from a physical machine to a virtual machine to reduce my hardware footprint. Everything is setup and the card is seen. When I go to scan channels it says either says timed out no channels or timed out no signal. I'm currently receiving 100% signal strength. I am running off an antenna on the roof of my house. I tested it on my TV and it works fine. Could this have something to do with me using PCI passthrough for my tuner? The card I am using is a HAUPPAUGE WinTV-quadHD PCI Express TV Tuner Card 1609. I am also running kernel version 4.10 in order to be able to use the tuner. I was previously running kernel version 4.9 RC4 on my physical backend.

Here is my ESXi host specs

AMD A10-5800K CPU
16GB of memory
Gigabyte motherboard
10Gbps Intel 540XT Network Card
VMware ESXi 6.5 attached to vCenter 6.5

Any help or guidance would be appreciated.

[maff]

Have you tried scanning from something other than mythtv?

Worth installing w_scan and giving that a whirl from the terminal, would help narrow down whether it's a mythtv thing or a hardware/drivers thing.

[cmaske]

I ran w_scan and it locked on to several channels in my area. I need to figure out why mythtv is not able to lock onto the channels. I will have to go through the backend logs to see if I can get more data.

[mlab]

Did anyone find a fix for this problem?

I seem to be having the same issue. I am using a Haupaugee WinTv QuadHD card (ATSC version) on an IBM X3650 M3 server running VMWare ESXi 6.5 with all the latest updates installed as of December 19th. My Mythbackend (tried versions 28 and 29) instance is running on a VM with a Debian 9 installation which comes by default with the 4.9 kernel required by the tuner card.

If I try doing the scan with Debian natively installed on the same computer then all Channels are found successfully so it cannot be an antenna, hardware or OS issue.

On the VM, I notice there is a signal lock on the channels that should be found, however no channels get detected.

Any help would be appreciated.

[didierj.richard]

Hello
IIRC from another thread, some changes in the V4L modules and libraries prevent recent MythTV on Debian's stock kernel 4.9 to properly scan channels.
With a Debian 9 under ESX 6.5U2 I've had some goods and bads at using the WinTV-QuadHD card in passthrough mode.
MythTV 29 went OK for weeks but started having random success to record following the ESX being updated to build 10884925.

I just did a full reset/reinstall with MythTV 30, released mid-january
With current kernel 4.19-0 from stretch-backports, channel acquisition is OK, a remote Kodi plus mythtv-client gets proper LiveTV, and an instant-record through mythweb is fine after fixing the 'locale' of mythtv user to some UTF8

The ESX is a home-made whitebox, the Hauppage shows as 'Conexant CX23885' for ESX and 'Silicon Labs Si2168-B40' from Linux, plus the 'dvb-demod-si2168-b40-01.fw' firmware file. Only half-the-card / two-tuners are assigned to the VM

Hope that helps

[didierj.richard]

Hello

Debian's stock 4.9 has issues at scanning, see viewtopic.php?t=2249
I have below setup running OK (scan, LiveTV on a remote Kodi, and instant recording from MythWeb)
- Debian 9 with stretch-backports , running kernel 4.19-bpo0
- whitebox PC running ESX Build 10884925
- the QuadHD card being toggled in PassThrough mode by ESX, exporting half-the-card / same interrupt / two tuners to the Linux VM (the other half for additionnal testings)
- kernel detects two 'si2168 + si2157 , Silicon Labs Si2168-B40' and loads additionnal firmware file dvb-demod-si2168-b40-01.fw
- MythTV 30 ( 30.0-dmo1~bpo9+1 ) re-installed from scratch today

Hope that helps