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Hi All, 
I've a couple of PCTV 292e USB tuners and also a spare Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian Buster. 
I was thinking about setting this up as a TV tuner backend and streaming from it to my Kodi instances. 

The Googling I've done references some how-tos but they relate to older versions of Raspbian. I'm just wondering whether anyone has set this up with these tuners on Buster, and whether you have a simple walk through / how to guide. 

Thanks in advance.
How experienced are you with the Raspbian command line?   If you're not that experienced, then you'll probably find it a lot easier just to install LibreElec on the Pi 3B and then install their pre-built TV Headend service (which is a great TV Tuner back-end), then leave the machine running LibreElec headless.  The LE builds have all the normal USB DVB Tuner firmware (that's not normally shipped in standard Raspbian) and have a relatively recent TV Headend build. Although you're running LibreElec on the Pi (which has a full Kodi install) you don't have to use any of the Kodi bits - it's just a neat way of getting TV Headend up and running quickly.  Plus if you want to you can also use the Pi as a client.

However if you want to do this in Raspbian : 

If you boot your Pi running Raspbian without the USB tuner connected, plug it in and then look at dmesg | grep dvb you'll probably see a message about it trying to load firmware and failing.

For the PCTV 292e you will probably need to source the right firmware :https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/PCTV_Systems_tripleStick_T2_(292e)#Firmware 

I'd probably do :

cd /lib/firmware
sudo wget https://github.com/OpenELEC/dvb-firmware...-b40-01.fw


NB this URL has been truncated in the forum viewer but if you right click on it and save the URL you can paste that in to terminal, or you can go here https://github.com/OpenELEC/dvb-firmware...-b40-01.fw and right click on the Download button to get the URL.

This will download the PCTV 292e firmware from the OpenElec git repo which will allow the tuner to properly initialise. (The Windows drivers upload this firmware to the USB device every time it is plugged in, but this firmware is not distributed with most Linux distros, though the driver that uploads it and handles everything else is...)

Then I'd reboot.

sudo reboot or reboot from the Raspbian desktop if you are running a desktop distro.

Doing a dmesg | grep dvb again should show a more encouraging message about the PCTV being initialised and the firmware downloaded. This confirms that the USB DVB tuner is now going to work properly.

Then I'd probably just install the Raspbian version of TV Headend with :

sudo apt install tvheadend

unless you were confident in building from sources. 

This will ask you to create an admin password.

Reboot again, just to be sure everything is OK, and then point a web browser on the same network as your Pi 3B to http://ip.address.of.pi:9981  (you may find that http://raspberry.local:9981 works on your OS if that Pi is the only one on your network OR you have changed the other Pis host names - but to be honest just keeping an eye on the IP address makes sense.  Chances are your router will give your Pi the same IP address all the time - but if not you might want to configure your router to do that, so the IP address of your TV Headend Pi is always the same, or worse case configure it with a static IP address outside the DHCP range of your router.)

Once you are in to TV Headend it will take you through a set-up wizard.  This will work OK for many people - but if it doesn't - let me know and I'll help you set-up from scratch.  It helps to know the main transmitter you receive from.

Which region are you in?
Thanks for this. Going to give it a go now and see :-)
All worked perfectly... thanks again. 
I found that dmesg | grep dvb only worked WITH the device plugged in... WITHOUT it plugged in, no response was given on screen. 
Cheers again for the time you took to respond. 

John :-)
(2020-06-06, 19:53)haverer2 Wrote: [ -> ]All worked perfectly... thanks again. 
I found that dmesg | grep dvb only worked WITH the device plugged in... WITHOUT it plugged in, no response was given on screen. 
Cheers again for the time you took to respond. 

John :-)

Sorry - I missed out the vital 'and then plug it in' - have edited my guide in case others find it useful.