Synology - USB TV tuner not recognised

Question

I’ve got a DS218+ Synology NAS drive along with a Hauppauge ‘WinTV-dualHD’ USV tv tuner (model number is 1590). I’m trying to get the two working together, however I cannot get the Synology box to recognise the tuner at all. I’ve tried using the built in ‘VideoStation’ application and ‘tvheadend’ but the device simply isn’t recognised.

Digging a bit deeper, and approaching it as a Linux driver issue instead of Synology, I found this link which describes how to install the required firmware - https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-dualHD . I downloaded the dvb-demod-si2168-b40-01.fw file into ‘lib/firmware’ but it hasn’t made a difference.

Is there any advice anyone could offer? Either any experience with Synology and Hauppauge tuners, or simply diagnosing issues on a Linux setup when devices aren’t recognised.

I’ve ran ‘dmesg’ and ‘lsusb’ and the outputs can be seen below.

dmesg - https://pastebin.com/BmDGLw8L lsusb- https://pastebin.com/Z4WiFbqy

Answer 1

Note the kernel versions mentioned in the linuxtv.org wiki page: the minimum required kernel version is either 4.7 (for the DVB version) or 4.11 (for the ATSC version). For full functionality, you'd need version 4.17 or later, which is quite new.

Your Synology has kernel version 3.10.105, whose TV drivers are way too old to recognize Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD. There is a volunteer-maintained backport driver source but unless Synology (or someone else) has already compiled and packaged them for their NAS devices, you would need to set up a cross-compile environment to produce binaries for ARM hardware, and then use it compile the drivers to match the exact kernel version used in your Synology NAS (as @dirkt already said in his answer).

It is probably doable, but it's going to be a quite complex procedure. If you haven't compiled anything from source before, this is likely to be an extremely challenging task.

Answer 2

Partial answer:

As you can see from the lsusb output, the hardware is working fine. As you also can see from the dmesg output, it finds the device during boot

[   28.071704] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci-hcd

but then nothing happens. Which means that the kernel modules are missing (not only the firmware, which you installed). You can verify that by looking at the configuration of the Synology kernel.

So you need to cross-compile and install the missing modules (quite a few of them, according to the page you linked) on the Synology, for the correct version of the kernel the Synology is currently using.

I guess people have done that for Synology stations, but I haven't done it myself, so I can't give advice. I'm sure googling will turn up how to do it.