[mrwish]

Just wondering if anyone with more experience than I have can help me with tuner card driver issues in Linux.

Currently running XBMC/Kodi on a dedicated PC running Ubuntu. I have a dual tuner DVBSky S952 DVB-S2 card which I use for French and German TV on 13/19.2°E via TVHeadend.

In Linux the DVBSky cards require you to download their own drivers including their version of media_build, as described on LinuxTV.

With these settings I've had everything working fine for a while now, but I now also have a USB DVB-T2 digital terrestrial stick that I want to add to the system (a PCTV 290e which I've used with Openelec on a mini PC before, all working nicely). The problem is that even though this USB tuner is supported in the Linux kernel, the media_build drivers from DVBSky don't work and I can't see the USB stick in TVHeadend (plus dmesg shows em2800xx errors). If I download and compile the regular media_build drivers for Linux, the PCTV 290e will work but I then lose my DVBsky satellite card.

Is there any way I can just get the specific drivers for the USB stick without overwriting the whole of the media_build install and losing my satellite card access?

My other thought was to eventually get a DVBSky T982 dual tuner PCIe DVB-T2 card but I've heard that they're not particularly sensitive tuner-wise. That'd be OK if I lived in a strong signal area but our DVB-T/T2 signal is around 46dBuV which is usable but on the weak side (ideal is 50dBuV+) according to the installer who did our aerial. Anyone got any experience with this card?

Thanks for your time!

[dhead]

I believe that DVBSky pushed all their drivers to the media tree, see this, so just build v4l-dvb.

I'm getting the DVBSky T982 because both the Mygica T220 and T230 can't get signal in my setup (no problem with any other USB DVB-T dongles) so I hope the T982 will be much better, I can update here when I'll get it but it will take at least a month to arrive.

[mrwish]

Thanks for the info on both counts!

I'll try the V4L driver build to get my PCTV 290e working with my set-up.

I'll be interested to hear what the T982 is like. My end aim is to have a fully integrated solution and that card does look like it would tick all the boxes provided it's sensitive enough.

Could just use the satellite for UK channels, but British DVB-T2 has the advantage of using 1080p25 encoding on films/series which means I can record stuff and play it on my Nexus 7 tablet without stuttering!

[mrwish]

I believe that DVBSky pushed all their drivers to the media tree, see this, so just build v4l-dvb.

I'm getting the DVBSky T982 because both the Mygica T220 and T230 can't get signal in my setup (no problem with any other USB DVB-T dongles) so I hope the T982 will be much better, I can update here when I'll get it but it will take at least a month to arrive.

Did you ever receive your T982? What's it like performance-wise?

I couldn't get both cards to function with v4l. That made the PCTV 290e work fine but stopped the DVBSky DVB-S2 card from working again.

When I get time I'm going to try a complete fresh install of Ubuntu to see if I can get both cards working with the V4L drivers. All a bit of a faff because there's also the issue of sorting out the boot into Kodi and building the drivers for my Smargo card reader! Really want to get it sorted though because we have a TV in a room without an aerial connection and it'd be great to be able to watch DVB-T channels on it with the mini PC I have connected to it via my TVHeadend install.

[clown48]

I don't use DVB-T, but I have a Digital Devices DVB-S Cine 6.5 card and it works flalwlessly out of the box. No drivers needed, automatically recognized by TVHeadend.

They're a bit expensive, but I would recommend for ease of installation. I'm planning on getting the DVB-C/T version next week also. I'll give some feedback when I install it. I tried a couple of USB DVB-C/T sticks and TVHeadend or Enigma 2 didn't recognize either.

Hope this helps.

[noggin]

It isn't TV Headend that recognises tuners or not, it's your Linux build (kernel and/or installed firmware in general, unless your sticks have userland drivers like the Sundtek models?)

TV Headend uses the standard Linux APIs to talk to DVB tuners so is no different to VDR or MythTV in what it supports (though in some cases TV Headend supports newer APIs so will support DVB-T2 on newer tuners that other software doesn't)