USB tuner and kernel.org

[David Timms]

Mick M. wrote:
> Hello list;
>   I recently bought an Autumn Wave OnAir HDTV USSB tuner.
Hmmm, a digital TV tuner device.

> I read the pvrusb2 driver setup information.
Is that a URL on the web ?
Did you take care of their advice ?

> Under F10 it fails with:
> 
> [root at localhost ~]# tvtime
1. you won't want to be root for playing TV.
2. tvtime: High quality video for Linux
tvtime is a high quality television application for use with video 
capture cards on Linux

What that means is it is for inserting captures of analog video into 
your vga output (display), it doesn't do dvb (digital tv) decoding.

> [root at localhost ~]# xawtv
> no video grabber device available
Again, /dev/video0 is the analog capture device - your device probably 
doesn't have one.

> [root at localhost ~]# ls -l /dev/video*
> ls: cannot access /dev/video*: No such file or directory
Only useful for analog capturing tuner cards/devices.

For digital, look for:
$ ls -lR /dev/dv*
should see adapter folder, demux, dvr, frontend, net0, probably.

> [root at localhost ~]# lsmod
> Module                  Size  Used by
> pvrusb2               138896  0 
Your device module is loaded.
Did you do this manually, or add manual entries to make this device load ?
Since we want such a device to just work for all users, we can get an 
entry in appropriate files to make this driver get loaded for your 
particular usb device no

> dvb_core               84380  1 pvrusb2
The dvb demuxer module is loaded.

> [root at localhost ~]# lsusb
> Bus 001 Device 003: ID 11ba:1101  
Is this it ?
Post the detail output for the particular device; we can't see anything 
about the device yet. Since it wasn't named by lsusb, it is probable 
that the device ID's are not yet in the appropriate file so that it can 
be loaded automatically.
Can you find it in:
http://www.smolts.org/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

Can you post a link to the smolts hardware database ? You get this by
running smoltSendProfile, and then the to Share your profile public link 
URL is given after you send the profile.

> Has anyone got this thing to work?
I have used similar (older) tuners. Is yours brand new (ie made late 
last year, early this year) ?

see So: below.

> How do you compile tyhe new kernels?
Uncertain yet as to whether you will need to compile a kernel (but if 
you really do, see: 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Building_a_custom_kernel ); in any case 
there is a pretty new one in updates-testing if you are sure that your 
device is so new yet different from earlier devices, and that it's 
support is only in the newest kernel.

Fedora does not include any digital TV viewing apps since they must 
implement patented mpg2 and or mpeg4 decoding. The kernel driver for dvb 
(digital video broadcasting) provides demuxing services, but not 
decoding of the mpg2 streams into video frames.

So:
0. yum install dvb-apps
1. view http://rpmfusion.org/ and "enable rpm fusion on your system"
2. yum install mplayer-gui xine
3. tune the channels using the dvb-apps (basically you need the system 
to create a channels.conf, this tells the applications how to 
tune/display the various channels that are found at your location)
4. mplayer dvb://"ABC TV"  or   xine dvb://ABC TV

[3] is could be broken down into simpler steps.

DaveT.