Pinnacle PCTV HD Card (800i)

From MythTV

Working for MythTV 0.20.2, but drivers are currently available for it only from LinuxTV (see below for driver detail). According to LinuxTV, the drivers are likely to be officially included in the 2.6.25 kernel.

--Update Oct-2008 - This worked out of the box on opensuse 11.0 with the 2.6.25 kernel. Just needed to download the firmware.

--Update Nov-2008 - This worked out of the box on Mythbuntu 8.10 which comes with 2.6.27 kernel. The firmware was needed on this application as well. There is a "raspy" electronic sound that I have yet to fix. Dropping your recording volume

Contents 1 Overview/Features 2 Making it Work 2.1 Make it Work Under Mythbuntu 8.10 2.2 Firmware 2.3 Drivers 2.4 Mythtv Setup 2.4.1 Digital 2.4.2 Analog 2.5 Remote Control Support 2.6 Raspy Audio 2.7 FM Radio 3 External Links 4 Possible Conflicts

Overview/Features

A hybrid device that supports analog, ATSC (8-VSB) and digital cable (QAM) TV sources. The card also supports analog A/V inputs, and has an IR remote control input as well as FM radio. (Unknown at this time if the FM Radio works under Linux). The XC5000 tuner on this card is able to pick up considerably more over-the-air digital channels than most other cards.

This card has been found at Best Buy and Circuit City, as well as woot.

This card uses a Conexant CX23883-39 chip.

Making it Work

Make it Work Under Mythbuntu 8.10

1. Install the firmware as described in the "Firmware" section below and restart.
2. The MythTV's backend setup program should now be able to find and use the card. Add your channels, etc.
3. Preview a channel. If you've got the raspy audio problem, see the "Raspy Audio" section below.

Firmware

You MUST have the firmware for the XC5000 tuner installed for the 800i to function properly. The firmware can be obtained by extracting it from the Windows' driver file; both an extracting script and and the Windows driver file are available here. After you have recovered the firmware file, place a copy of it in your /lib/firmware directory. (This directory may differ with some distros; consult your distro's documentation for the appropriate location). Note that despite the firmware having 'DVB' listed in its name, this is to be used when receiving DVB or ATSC QAM channels.

UPDATE: As of May 5th, 2009, there is a newer version of the firmware version available here. The latest v4l-dvb tree REQUIRES this version be used. For more information on the changes, please see the announcement.

Drivers

Full support for the device is now in the LinuxTV mainline v4l-dvb repo. Both analog and digital TV are supported, and the remote control should also function properly. Analog TV (through co-axial, s-video, or composite inputs) is received through /dev/video* and Digital TV is received through /dev/dvb/adapter*/dvr*.

To download the latest v4l-dvb tree, simply select the bz2 or gz link on the top left of the page, then build them via running "make" followed by "make install" ("sudo make install" if you are not logged in as root). More thorough downloading/building instructions can be found here.

Be sure to restart your computer before entering the setup.

Mythtv Setup

As usual, to setup in Mythtv, stop the backend and run mythtv-setup. When you go to add a video card you can add two different types of cards for the same physical card in your machine.

Digital

You can add a DVB card and this will allow you to scan for digital OTA or QAM channels.

This card does have two tuners, one digital and one analog, however only one can be used at a time. When you add the digial card in myth you, you MUST go to "Recording Options" and check "Open DVB card on demand". If you do not do this, the DVB card will always be open and you will only receive "fuzz" on the analog device.

If you're experiencing problems scanning for channels try increasing the signal and tuning timeouts under card setup. Doubling these values (6000 ms / 11000 ms) may help to find more channels. If you're having trouble changing channels during LiveTV, try the patch mentioned in this forum post. If you're able to view certain channels by setting the initial channel in mythbackend setup, but not by changing channels during LiveTV, you're likely experiencing timeout issues fixed by this patch.

For help on adding digital channels, see:

• Adding Digital Cable Channels (For ATSC/QAM Tuner Cards -- USA/Canada)
• Adding Digital Cable Channels For DVB-C Tuner Cards -- Norway

Analog

You can add a V4L Analog Card and this will allow you to scan for analog channels coming in on co-axial cable, s-video, or composite inputs. You can add multiple V4L Analog cards to myth for one physical card in your machine, one for each input and treat each input as a different tuner.

The audio stream from this card comes in on its own audio device. If your system is like most you only have one sound card, and its device is typically /dev/dsp or /dev/dsp0. If this is the case then the audio device for your PCTV card is probably /dev/dsp1. When creating the capture card in mythtv-setup, you have to set the audio device to which ever one is for your capture card, again typically /dev/dsp1

If the sound is tinny or distorted, open the frontend and go into Utilities/Setup > Setup > TV Settings > Recording Profiles > Software Encorders (v4l based). For each of the appropriate profiles, find the Audio Quality section and change the codec to Uncompressed, sampling rate to 48000.

If you only receive "fuzz" on all of the channels on the analog tuner see the note above in the "digital" section regarding the special recording option that needs to be set in the digital card's setup.

Remote Control Support

The card uses the CX2388x's standard IR interface, and, it is fully supported now via the linux input layer. You may use LIRC with the input device driver option. See the Remote Controllers page for more details on how to configure LIRC with remote controls that use the linux input layer.

Raspy Audio

Once correctly setup, preview a channel. Your audio will be raspy. To get around this, edit your recording profile(s) (Frontend: Utilities / Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> Recording Profiles -> Software Encoders). On the audio section (last screen) of any given recording profile (e.g. Live TV), set the following (note that you must make these changes for all the recording profiles you intend to use).

• Codec: MP3
• Sample Rate: 48000
• MP3 Quality: 9
• Volume: 50%

The 'Volume' and 'Sample Rate' settings are the important ones. If your system is limited on storage space, a lower 'MP3 Quality' can likely be used.

FM Radio

Linux support for this card's FM radio is unknown as of OCT-2008

External Links

• Adding_Digital_Cable_Channels_(For_ATSC/QAM_Tuner_Cards_--_USA/Canada)
• Pinnacle product page
• LinuxTV page
• Information on the card
• Search for channels that you *should* be able to receive on the digital tuner of this card
• Testing the card

Possible Conflicts

After compiling and installing the v4l-dvd libraries to support the 800i my dual tuner PVR-500 was unable to be probed by MythTV and I lost sound during playback in the frontend of the machine where the libraries were installed. All other frontends were fine. I did gain backend support for the 800i as well as the pchd-5500 card also installed in the box. This frontend/backend machine is running Mythbuntu 7.10.

The installation of v4l-dvb on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) breaks the cx88-alsa and saa7134-alsa.ko kernel modules due to ALSA no longer being compiled in the kernel. This means that installing v4l-dvb in order to support the 800i on a Hardy system will disable the ability to grab NTSC audio with the 800i and any other card using the cx88 or saa7134 v4l modules. One solution is to install a vanilla 2.6.25 kernel on top of Ubuntu 8.04 (which works surprisingly well.) You'll need to configure the kernel build to include ALSA and the appropriate video capture modules.