DVICO-Ultraview Install in Australia

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Background

The following text represents my working notes, made when I updated my analogue (PVR-350 based) mythtv box to use a Ultraview DVB-T (which is basically a DViCO DVB-T re-badged).

These notes have also been edited by Richard Dale who uses two DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Plus cards on FC4 in Melbourne, and Warwick Allison with slightly newer/different cards.

There are also notes for DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Tuner cards.

These notes do *not* apply to the DVICO "Lite" cards (Warwick never got those to actually work, but Dane Allison did).


The latest versions (as at 30 March 2007) of V4L now support the Ultraview Lite cards.

Hardware

When installing your card, ensure that you plug the ultraview/dvico audio-out port into the CD-in port (or AUX, if you have one), on your sound card. This is an on-card port in both cases - not one of the ones at the rear that you can access from outside your computer. A suitable cable is supplied with the Ultraview.

The "DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Tuner" card has two tuners. One is PCI, the other is USB. You will either need to connect an external USB cable to your card, or use the supplied internal USB cable which connects to your motherboard.

Kernel / Packages

For the Ultraview card on FC3 with 2.6.12, Kudzu will automatically add an entry into /etc/modprobe.conf for you for the card, which should look like this:

   alias char-major-81 cx8800

On the Ultraview card on FC3 with 2.6.12 you will need to force the cx88xx module into DVICO mode by adding the following like

   options cx88xx card=21

On FC4, kernel 2.6.15 and the DViCO FusionHDTV cards I didn't need to make any changes to modprobe.conf but did need to add the following lines to the start function of /etc/rc.d/init.d/mythbackend

/sbin/modprobe video-buf-dvb
/sbin/modprobe cx88-dvb

For Ubuntu Breezy, modify the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases, and change the line:

 alias char-major-81 videodev

to:

 alias char-major-81 cx8800

Also, create a file /etc/modprobe.d/dvico with the following contents:

 options cx88xx card=21

DViCO Dual Digital 2

Note: Much of this information below is historical. Ubuntu 10.4 (and possibly others) have the DViCO Dual Digital 2 working out-of-the-box, except for enabling propriety firmware for DVB cards via "enable hardware drivers".

For those with a revision 1.4 or later board, Chris Pascoe has just released (August 2006) an update to make it work.

I have confirmed it working on FC5 with a 2.6.17.8 vanilla kernel, and others have tested it to be working on other combinations.

It's part of the v4l-dvb sources. You will need to get the latest mercurial sources, and compile them. Most distros have mecurial available as extras (e.g. yum install mercurial). They recommend you use a vanilla kernel (i.e. one from www.kernel.org) and compile it yourself. In either cace, you'll need the kernel source. FC5 kernel soruce may be downloaded using yum install kernel-devel.

The instructions are quite easy to follow. Find them at http://www.linuxtv.org and look for the "DVB CVS/Mercurial" on the sidebar.

Getting the Firmware manually

In addition to the v4l-dvb drivers, the USB tuner (it has both PCI and USB tuners) needs the correct firmare to operate.

If you do not have the firmware (FC5 does not ship with it, not sure if any others do), there is a script in the kernel documentation to get it:

 cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.17.8/Documentation/dvb/   # Modify for source directory, if necessary
 chmod 777 get_dvb_firmware
 ./get_dvb_firmware bluebird

And you'll need to copy it to one of the following two places, depending on your distro:

 cp dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw   # OR
 cp dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw /lib/firmware/dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw   # This one for FC5

Alsa

Ensure that your 'CD' device on your sound card is enabled as a 'capture' device. Run: alsamixer, press F4 to switch to the 'Capture' options. Move to 'CD' and press 'space' to set CD as a capture device. Press F3 to jump back to 'Playback' and set the CD volume to 100%.