AVerTV HD A180
From MythTV
Contents |
Specifications
The AVerTV HD A180 (AVerTV HD MCE A180) is an HDTV tuner for OTA (ATSC) or unencrypted digital cable (QAM) signals. Although the card includes S-video and composite inputs (including RCA audio jacks), these inputs don't appear to work in Linux, so you can't use the card for analog recording, even from a set-top box, VCR, or other device. However, it does tune analog channels within its frequency range. It is important to note though that the analog tuner of this card does not have a hardware MPEG2 encoder; it is an old fashioned frame grabber based tuner. Therefore, it is highly unrecommended for analog use.
The card uses an nxt2004 Frontend chipset with an saa7135 bridge interface. This is similar to the ATI HDTV Wonder and the Kworld ATSC 110.
Loading drivers
The latest kernel (2.6.15 at the time of this writing) includes support for this card
modprobe saa7134-dvb
is enough to load the drivers. If you run hotplug it may load the saa7134 module which you will need to "blacklist" from loading and add the saa7134-dvb module to the load at boot time. This will vary depending on your distribution.
You will also need to download the firmware for the nxt2004. Make sure you have your kernel-doc packages (the kernel documentation) installed as you have to use a script to download the file. These will most likely be found in
/usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.15_blah_/Documentation/dvb
or
/usr/share/doc/linux-doc-2.6.15_blah_/Documentation/dvb
If you don't have this, you may need to install the documentation package
apt-get install kernel-doc-`uname -r`
or
yum install kernel-doc-`uname -r`
and may be gzipped. just run
gzip -d get_dvb_firmware.gz
and you will get the get_dvb_firmware script.
If this method doesn't work for you, you can also download the get_dvb_firmware script here. This may be the only way to get the script in Ubuntu.
From here run
# chmod +x get_dvb_firmware # ./get_dvb_firmware nxt2004
which will download the firmware file and extract the dvb-fe-nxt2004.fw file. You will then be asked to copy it to one of two places depending on your distribution.
Now you should be able to run
modprobe saa7134-dvb
which will create /dev/dvb/adapter#/ and its associated files.
Scanning for channels
The dvb-apps package that installed with Fedora Core 4 did not include any ATSC utilities so I downloaded and built the latest source distribution of the dvb-apps package.
Then I was able to start the process of Adding QAM Channels For HDTV Tuner Cards
Adding Tuner To MythTV
Once you are ready to add the tuner to MythTV run
mythtv-setup
and enter Capture Cards. Select New capture card and for Card type select DVB DTV capture card (v3.x).
DVB Card Number is the card number as /dev/adapter#, defaults for everything else should be fine.
Note: If you don't get the option to select Card type DVB DTV capture card (v3.x), then you probably didn't enable DVB when you compiled MythTV. Run ./configure --help and set the --enable-dvb, --dvb-path, and (maybe) --enable-proc-opt.
Problems and Solutions
If you can't tune any stations, try shutting down the computer, waiting a few seconds, and starting it up again. The AVerTV HD A180 in at least one wiki contributor's system can get into a state in which it doesn't work (or at least in which MythTV can't use it). Even a warm reset won't help in this case; only a cold start will return the card to useability.
