DVB Aver Media

This is work in progress THIS IS BROKEN

Apologies to those people thinking this page would answer all their questions. I currently don’t have the card working. When I next get some hacking time it’ll go in another box, and see if it fares any better…

Although it sounds like it is fully up and running, I’m still compiling, I’m writing my thoughts as I go along, so I don’t forget them!

I have an Avermedia AVerTV DVB-T card in my debian(unstable)/freevo mini-itx based set-top box. I chose this card as it appears to be supported by the http://www.linuxtv.org drivers. However, this card I got is the newer 711 revision, so the avermedia readme from linuxtv.org doesn’t work ;-(. However, support appears to be provided, using a different tuner frontend. Note some of this is based on http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/mythdvb.html

#Using latest 2.6 kernel (2.6.9rc2) with the bytesex.org patches for VideoForLinux http://dl.bytesex.org/patches/2.6.9-rc2-2/

  Get the kernel from you favourite mirror (checking the md5 sum against kernel.org)   Unpack the kernel image   Get the 'kraxel' patch from the bytesex.org linux above   cd into the kernel image directory (I use /usr/src/linux-2.6 here)   Patch with the bytesex patch        gunzip -c /path/to/patch-2.6.9-rc2-kraxel.gz |patch -p1

#Ensure the following kernel modules are enabled, in addition to those needed for you other hardware!

  Devices/Media/VideoForLinux      bt878 support      Devices/Media/Digital Video Broadcasting      All disabled - will be using the linuxtv.org cvs versions

  Devices/Sound/ALSA     bt8xx audio support

#build the kernel using you prefered method (being debian based I prefer the make-kpkg route)

#Reboot!

  watch the boot procedure/dmesg output, if you have the discover tools installed, you should see the bttv driver being loaded, double check it's finding the correct card (card number 123 [[AverTV]] DVB-T)

#Build the dvb-kernel drivers

  get the drivers from CVS     mkdir /usr/src/dvb_cvs     cd /usr/src/dvb_cvs     cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@linuxtv.org:/cvs/linuxtv login     cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@linuxtv.org:/cvs/linuxtv co dvb-kernel       cd dvb-kernel/build-2.6      make

to test, manually insert all the drivers needed, check dmesg output to check the there are no errors. if not already loaded:

modprobe bttv modprobe dvb-bt8xx modprobe mt352

You should now have an activated card. Next step is to scan for channels. If you havn’t already done so, install the dvb-tools from http://linuxtv.org. under Debian (unstable) “apt-get install dvb-utils” does the job. With the dvb-tools, there should be the frequency documentation, on Debian this ends up in

/usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan. Hence in your home directory, do (assuming like me you using the Isle of Wight Transmitter!)

scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-t/uk-Rowridge >channels.conf

You should now be able to tune and watch TV! eg to tune to BBC 1

tzap "BBC ONE" 

then to view in mplayer

dvbstream -o -ps -qam 16 -cr 3_4 600 601 | mplayer -