Frank,
Off course I'm not sure about this, but I can tell you I have been fighting with this for something like a month or so.
I did countless installs, all kinds of Ubuntu / Kubuntu various versions, various kernels etc.
I have plenty of hd's, and also since 0810 beta you can now have more than one installation next to another. This makes it easier to compare stuff.
If you install v4l-dvb using hg clone
http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb try using
hg clone -r 13486 http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb instead.
This will install the exact same repo / driverset I am using.
I have found that using a more recent repo version
DID NOT WORK. Don't ask me why, because I don't know.
Also, I would advise to use the same version of firmware I'm using, as this is known working.
I have been using the 'newest' one available in the beginning, and it didn't work out. Again, I don't know why...
Another point of information:
I haven't found any information on this, but I THINK that Kaffeine does not use firmware, or, it may use it differently.
Why I say this? I have read that in some cases it may be sufficient that 'the firmware' has been loaded once (e.g. using M$ Windows) so this may be the case for Kaffeine, I'm not sure.
As for the country settings:
Are you aware that you can use various tools to scan for channels? Google around if you don't know yet.
For Kaffeine you can find what I call 'presets' with frequency information in ~/.kde/share/apps/kaffeine/dvb-t/
There you will find from es-Albacete to es-Zaragoza. Don't know what region you're in, but pick the one of your location.
When you install v4l-dvb, it installs similar 'presets' but to a different location - use slocate to find if needed.
Indeed it may make a difference, in my case e.g. there is no setting for Belgium, so scanning default for Australia the range of channels scanned is different according to location.
For comparison's sake I installed Ubuntu 0904. Then sudo apt-get install mythtv and everything works out of the box!
(different kernel - and myth 0.21) so all I had to do was make the symbolic links to make myth 0.21 see the second frontend.
I guess this is about all I can really tell...
Hope this helps....
Erwin
PS You can also compare your lspci -v to mine attached in Mandingo's post. (txt attachment)