Make Hauppauge HVR-4000 work on Debian...

Make Hauppauge HVR-4000 work on Debian...

I have long time owned this, very popular at its time, capture card, and it is still working fine in my Windows 7 based Media Center HTPC:
It is able to tune DVB-T (terrestrial) digital and analog broadcasts nicelly and, in the same card, it is able to tune DVB-S satellite broadcastings, it includes a practical remote, and overall, it is the typical, early 90s/2000s rugged PCI device, rock solid and stable, capable of handling ugly electrostatic load from directly connected antennae, that has survived several HTPCs and other companion devices during its life.

Being a Linux enthusiast, running my HTPC from Windows is somehow disturbing, but, simply put, it works "out-of-the-box" whereas you've to be lucky with hardware and/or expend plenty of time to get a decent, Linux based HTPC.

In this case, while being on vacation, I have being testing some new HTPC Linux alternatives, mainly Kodi over my beloved Debian Linux...
One of the several "show-stoppers" I faced is the lack of support of my TV tunner card, but, since I managed to get it to work, I though this may be helpful to someone else...

Kernel OK but missing firmware...

At kernel level, the card is perfectly recognized and set up, but upon system startup, you'll see ugly cx24116 and cx8800 firmware error messages in the console.

As usual, since Debian does not provide proprietary stuff, I added the 'non-free' repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list, and proceeded to install the non-free firmware package:

pico /etc/apt/sources.lit
apt-get update
apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree

 
But, to my deception, messages didn't vanished, so it meant that some firmware file is still missing.
Googling a little bit, I discovered that the missing firmware file is dvb-fe-cx24116.fw
I spend quite a while until I finally get a working copy of just this file... so I'm sharing it here, so no more pain in the future with this!.

So, since the card is working at kernel level, once you place the firmware file in /lib/firmware folder, so, you'll end up with the following, absolute path, file /lib/firmware/dvd-fe-cx24116.fw.
Reboot your system, and you're ready to tune in!!!!