Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Getting a TV card working with Debian

I made the mistake of buying a card without first checking that it would work with linux. How foolish. I was forced to replace it. I now have a DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4. I updated my system to Debian Wheezy (testing), 64 bit.

dmesg reveals the error:

[ 1501.907761] xc2028 1-0061: Error: firmware xc3028-v27.fw not found.

this problem is described at http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Xceive_XC3028/XC2028#How_to_Obtain_the_Firmware
However, those instructions assume 32 bit. I am on 64 bit.

there seems to be a problem getting hold of the the firmware file.
I registered on ubuntuforums.org and searched for firmware file. There is a post that has the file as an attachment.

I unpacked it and copied it to /lib/firmware.

Then I rebooted. The dmesg error went away.

I used the scan command to find the channels:

scan -u /usr/share/dvb/dvb-t/uk-CrystalPalace >channel.conf

I then gave the command:

cp channels.conf /etc && cp channels.conf ~/.tzap

The command:

tzap -c /etc/channels.conf -r 'BBC ONE'

is interesting. It produced the following over and over again.

status 1e | signal c024 | snr fdfd | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1e | signal c008 | snr fefe | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1e | signal c014 | snr fefe | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK

It is as if something else had the tuner resource.
However, as it turns out, this is what it is supposed to do. Starting another terminal session whilst tzap is still running enables me to give the command:

mplayer /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 which now works!

So I now have TV working on my debian machine. All I need now is to get a PVR environment working. I will have a go with either Freevo or MythTV.