[Gllug] Mythtv/dvb card problems

[John Winters]

On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 19:03 +0000, Paul Rayner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've recently bought one of these:
> 
> http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?CMP-DVBT20
> 
> On 13 Jan 2006, at 08:12, John Winters wrote:
> > which is cheap and so far 100% reliable using kernel 2.6.14.5 and the
> > latest Linux TV drivers.
> 
[snip]
> Is there an easy way to test this card? Most google results just say 
> cat /dev/video0 | mplayer <args>, but my machine is headless, so that's 
> not really an option, and there seems to be no way of setting a channel 

OK.  Firstly check out the latest version of the drivers from the
Video4Linux project and build and install them.

You need both the saa7134 and the saa7134-dvb modules loaded.

Then use tzap and the instructions on this web page:

http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/mythdvb.html

to test the card and get some crucial tuning information.  MythTV seems
to need some hints in order to get going.

Once you've successfully tuned the card with scan and tzap, take note of
one of the channel descriptions, like this:

BBC
ONE:505833330:INVERSION_OFF:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_2K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_32:HIERARCHY_NONE:600:601

and go into the mythtv-setup program.  In the card setup, set the card
type to DVB-T and when you get into scanning channels, fill in the data
from the line above - it's fairly obvious which item goes into which
field.  Then set it scanning and it should manage to find all the
channels.

One point of warning.  Once you've found the channels, *don't* run
mythfilldatabase without first reading this web page:

http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2005-July/096935.html

You need to use the mysql script referenced there to set the names of
the channels correctly, otherwise the mythtv-setup creates one lot of db
entries for the channels and the mythfilldatabase script sets up a
second lot and ne'er the twain shall meet.  DVB support in MythTV isn't
terribly polished yet (although apparently 0.19 is imminent).

Once it's up and running it's very nice.  I now have two of the above
cards in my server and everything runs very smoothly.

HTH
John

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