Me TV

Visionplus DVB-T card not detecting any channels on scan

Asked by Tony Mugan

Hi,

I've a fresh install of Hardy Heron Ubuntu 8.04.1 with all available patches.

I added your PPA to my software sources and got version 0.5.30 of me-tv.

On running it asks me if I want it to automatically create the channels file which I accept but no channels are detected.

The card shows up as follows from a lspci -v

05:02.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
 Subsystem: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd VisionPlus DVB card
 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 20
 Memory at fe001000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
 Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
 Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2

05:02.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
 Subsystem: Twinhan Technology Co. Ltd VisionPlus DVB Card
 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 20
 Memory at fe000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
 Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data
 Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2

And an lsmod shows the following drivers installed

$ lsmod | grep bt
dvb_bt8xx 17796 2
dvb_core 81404 2 dst,dvb_bt8xx
bt878 11832 2 dst,dvb_bt8xx
bttv 175860 2 dvb_bt8xx,bt878
ir_common 36100 1 bttv
compat_ioctl32 2304 1 bttv
i2c_algo_bit 7300 1 bttv
videobuf_dma_sg 14980 1 bttv
videobuf_core 18820 2 bttv,videobuf_dma_sg
btcx_risc 5896 1 bttv
tveeprom 16656 1 bttv
i2c_core 24832 5 dst,dvb_bt8xx,bttv,i2c_algo_bit,tveeprom
videodev 29440 1 bttv
v4l2_common 18304 2 bttv,videodev
v4l1_compat 15492 2 bttv,videodev

I'd be grateful for any advice.

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Tony Mugan
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Revision history for this message
Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

Hi Tony,

Do you have adequate signal? i.e. Does any other DVB software work for you?

Thanks,

Michael

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Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#2

Oops, wrong status, should be needs information.

Revision history for this message
Tony Mugan (tmugan) said : 		#3

Michael, thanks for the prompt reply.

How can I determine the strength of the signal?

This card has been lying idle for some time but seems to be working in so far as the OS seems to detect it ok.
I have only seen it working in brief spurts (i.e. a choppy video stream with regular dropouts) but cannot remember which application that was with. At the time I put that down to an underspec'ed machine.

Anything I can try here?

Revision history for this message
Tony Mugan (tmugan) said : 		#4

Totem gave me an option to play from the detected DVB-T card so I tried that.
After downloading some codec plugins (gstreamer), I downloaded and am running "w_scan" which is a command line utility that performs the scan.
It seems to be detecting some channels.

Once that completes, I will try to get Totem to test the DVB-T card.

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Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#5

Waiting for your result.

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Tony Mugan (tmugan) said : 		#6

I ran the following command to create a channels.conf for Totem which showed three channels. Although all three channels were then listed for playing, there was no audio or video.

./w_scan >> ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf

The channels.conf looked like this.
(I'm North Shore, Sydney)

[0524]:177500:I999B7C999D999M999T999G999Y0:T:27500:577:0;579:581:0:1316:0:0:0
[0006]:191500:I999B7C999D999M999T999G999Y0:T:27500:517+133:700=eng:0:0:6:0:0:0
[0224]:226500:I999B7C999D999M999T999G999Y0:T:27500:512+128:650=eng:576:0:548:0:0:0

Does this even look valid?

I'd be grateful for some advice on what to do next, w_scan was able to pick up some signals which gives me hope.

Revision history for this message
Tony Mugan (tmugan) said : 		#7

I've noticed that a lot of these apps look for a /dev/video0 device by default.
I don't have one of those but there is a /dev/dvb/adapter0/ directory which has a few devices beneath it.

$ ls -al /dev/dvb/adapter0/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 2008-09-07 19:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 60 2008-09-07 19:30 ..
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 4 2008-09-07 19:30 demux0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 5 2008-09-07 19:30 dvr0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 3 2008-09-07 19:30 frontend0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 7 2008-09-07 19:30 net0

Revision history for this message
Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#8

It seems that there's a more generic issue with your DVB setup. You should resolve that before using Me TV. Try the linux-dvb mailing list. I really don't know much about your issues.

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Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#9

/dev/video is for analog devices.

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Tony Mugan (tmugan) said : 		#10

Thanks anyway Michael, I guess I will look for some apps which assist with probing the device.
If I discover anything related to me-tv, I will post back.