Tony Houghton h@realh.co.uk 2005 Tony Houghton 1.5 03 Nov 2009 Typo (/dev/dvr/... instead of /dev/dvb/ 1.4 13 Feb 2007 Got rid of spamtrap. Hauppauge remote patch no longer necessary 1.3 16 January 2007 Corrected info about location of HOWTO. This version of Nova-T no longer current? 1.2 23 July 2006 bttv doesn't seem necessary after all. New info about location of HOWTO. New version of dvb-apps. Added note about /proc/bus/input/devices 1.1 24 February 2006 Now using relative links for downloadable files. Updated LIRC section and added inputlirc. Replaced "Nova-T" with "remote" in comment about enabling bttv. 1.0 1 November 2005 I can not guarantee the exact location of this document due to vagaries of whatever domain hosting package I'm using at any given time, but you should always be able to find it by going to http://www.realh.co.uk and following the link. I will also try to make it available directly at either http://dvbhowto.realh.co.uk/ or http://www.realh.co.uk/dvbhowto. Hauppauge's WinTV Nova-T is a PCI card for receiving digital terrestrial television broadcasts (DVB-T), eg the UK's Freeview service. This is a guide to using the card in Linux. Apparently there is more than one type of card with the same model name. This guide is for what I believe is unfortunately no longer the current version of the card, supplied with a grey remote control and based on saa7146 and tda10045 chips. Some of the information here should also be useful for other cards though. Linux's lspci command should identify at least one of the chips for you if you're not sure. This is often referred to as a "Budget" card because of the lack of a built-in MPEG decoder, while models with MPEG decoders are often refered to as "full-featured" (sometimes abbreviated to FF in technical circles). I recommend using the latest 2.6 series kernel, which has DVB drivers built in. You can also download the drivers either as a tarball or by CVS. See www.linuxtv.org and either compile them outside the kernel or patch them into the kernel source. This may give you newer versions of the drivers, but last time I tried patching the drivers into a recent kernel they failed to compile. There is some very good information about the DVB drivers in the dvb subdirectory of the kernel's documentation, although some of it is out of date. Start configuring the kernel, eg with make menuconfig, and go to Device Drivers Multimedia devices. Enable Video For Linux and Enable Video For Linux API 1, even if it says it's deprecated, then enter the Digital Video Broadcasting Devices section. There enable DVB For Linux and, preferably as modules DVB Core Support and the drivers for your card. The Nova-T uses the budget-ci module ( Budget cards with onboard CI connector ). Enabling this should automatically enable other modules/drivers it needs, including the TDA1004x front-end. Note the use of budget-ci as opposed to budget even though this card does not have a "Common Interface" (CI) connector. To be able to use the remote control you should also enable evdev (Device Drivers Input device support Event interface). When working the remote will generate events at /dev/input/eventX where X is a number which will vary depending on what devices are connected. To help work out which device is which, I've written a utility to scan input devices and print each one's description so that you can easily find which one corresponds to your remote. Download devinputscan.c, compile it, eg: gcc -Wall -o devinputscan devinputscan.c and run it. Or you can just examine the pseudo-file /proc/bus/input/devices. As of version 2.6.20 the budget-ci driver supplied with the Linux kernel now works correctly with the remote control featured in this article. No doubt this has also been the case with the separate driver package from linuxtv.org for some time before the kernel tree caught up. Previous versions of the budget-ci driver contained incorrect mappings for this card's remote. There is a patch in circulation to make the driver more sophisticated and able to load a mapping at run-time, but I used to use an alternative patch with the correct mapping encoded in it. There are two versions, depending on the driver version: hauppauge-ir.patch or hauppauge-ir-cvs.patch . The former is for older versions of the driver, and the latter for more recent ones including the ones supplied with kernel 2.6. Some DVB front-ends, including the TDA10045 used by the Nova-T, require firmware. Fortunately, as long as you know which chip is on your card, kernel 2.6 now makes this quite straightforward. In Documentation/dvb is a script called get_dvb_firmware. Near the start of the file is a variable called @components with a list of supported chips. Pick the one that matches your card and use it as an argument to the script eg: /usr/src/linux/Documentation/dvb/get_dvb_firmware tda10045 This will download and extract a suitable firmware image for the card and tell you where to install it. The module will automatically upload it to the card when necessary. www.linuxtv.org provides a package called linuxtv-dvb-apps with some essential utilities. Download it, unpack it, enter the directory and run make. There is no install target. You may find it useful to copy the utilities you need to /usr/local/bin and the information for your local transmitter (or satellite or cable provider etc) to a more convenient location. The first thing you need is a list of channels to tune your card to, which you can generate with the scan utility. It needs to find the frequency to which to tune initially to find the channels, which is provided in one of the subdirectories. For example, to tune to the Rowridge transmitter on the Isle of Wight, serving Southern England: cd /usr/src/linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.1/util/scan ./scan dvb-t/uk-Rowridge > ~/channels.conf For a list of options run it without any arguments. You can also copy the channels.conf into ~/.mplayer; recent versions of MPlayer can then play TV with the dvb:// URI, eg: mplayer 'dvb://BBC ONE' Similarly, Xine can interface directly with the card: xine 'dvb://' Then use its interface or the number keys to select channels. Note that many channel names contain spaces and need to be quoted on the command line. tzap - or one of its satellite and cable counterparts, czap and szap - can be used to tune the card to a channel and make its output available. All three are in the util/szap subdirectory of linuxtv-dvb-apps. As with scan, run it without any arguments for a syntax summary. The config file is a list of channels as generated with scan, and the -r option routes the output to a device node (default /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0) for cards with no inbuilt MPEG decoder. For example: /usr/src/linuxtv-dvb-apps-1.1.1/util/szap/tzap -r -c ~/channels.conf 'BBC ONE' You can record the transmission simply with: cat /dev/dvr/adapter0/dvr0 > recording.ts The .ts extension is quite arbitrary, but refers to the fact that the card's output is in MPEG Transport Stream format. .mpg files are more usually in Program Stream format. MPlayer and Xine can play tzap's output: mplayer - < /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 or xine stdin://mpeg2 < /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 The kernel's DVB FAQ lists some other useful tools and applications. If you want to use your PC as a PVR (Personal Video Recorder), VDR is arguably the best for a DVB card, because it was specifically written for them. However, with a budget card, lacking an MPEG decoder, you will need an output plugin, eg xine. Full details of setting up VDR, or any other PVR application, is beyond the scope of this document, but I do recommend joining the users' mailing list and using developer versions instead of the somewhat outdated 1.2 release. LIRC is a common interface between a variety of Linux applications, including MPlayer and Xine, and a variety of IR remote control devices. It can use the Nova-T's remote via its dev/input driver. Unfortunately it generates two events for each application and the developers seem to prefer to criticise Linux's input device interface than fix their code, so you'll probably need to patch it with lirc-devinput-doubleclick.patch. I've been told that setting: repeat_bit 2 in lircd.conf cures the problem for some people, but it didn't seem to work for me. I have also uploaded the following. Please note that on 24 Feb 2006 I updated lircd.conf and lircrc to use key names consistent with inputlirc. /etc/lirc/lircd.conf A mapping from devinput codes to LIRC commands. /etc/lirc/lircrc Applies the above LIRC commands to MPlayer. /etc/lirc/hardware.conf Instructs LIRC which driver to load etc. My HTPC is headless (no keyboard or mouse) so you'll probably need to change the DEVICE setting for a more conventional PC. Use my devinputscan utility to determine which device to use. inputlirc is a simplified LIRC daemon which works just for input devices. It is described with svn download instructions here and is also available as a Debian package. It does not suffer from the repeat bug in the full version of LIRC, but the repeat delay seems a little short. You will need the LIRC client libraries, and you may also find irw from the LIRC package useful to check for key names. For the Nova-T device you can look up the keys in my /etc/lirc/lircd.conf.