Recommend Hardware

Adam Sutton · 2012-08-21T15:10:14+00:00

I've created a wiki page [[DVBCards]] to make a note about known working cards, and peoples general thoughts etc... So far it only include [[TBS6981]] as th...

PANiCnz

Have used the following successfully

Tevii S480
Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-TD-500

ASUS My Cinema-U3000 Mini

All work fine with TVheadend, but all were purchase because of good Linux support.

Arend van der Boom

I use an AnySee 30C Plus USB DVB-C Tuner (ID 1c73:861f AMT Anysee E30 USB 2.0 DVB-T Reciever) on an Ubuntu 12.04 32bits Acer Aspire 1825PTZ Netbook. I did need to recompile the DVB drivers to get the tuner correctly working though, so your milage may vary. XBMC Frodo is used as a frontend. Still in the process to figure out what and how to build my own media center and with what ;-)

Bruce McAlister

I use:

DVB-T * Hauppage WinTV Nova-T 500
* I had to add the following entries in to/etc/modprobe.d/options.conf
*

options usbcore autosuspend=-1 # Disable USB sleep mode options dvb_usb_dib0700 force_lna_activation=1 # Force the activation of the LNA's options dvb_usb disable_rc_polling=1 # Disable the remote control sensor

DVB-S2 * Digital Devices Cine S2 v6

Both the above adapters were detected 100% with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server (64-bit) running kernel version 3.2.0-35-generic.

I've not seen any issues with these while testing over the past 2 to 3 months.

Sébastien Aubry

For DVB-T, I use the Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T-500.
I did not have to add anything to options.conf, it just worked out of the box under XBMCbuntu Eden (based on Ubuntu 11.10).

Kev S

My Setup is an Acer Revo R3600 running Ubuntu 12.04LTS, but with an upgraded Kernel of 3.6.0-030600-generic with XBMC Eden-pvr.

DVB-T *MSI Digivox* - Needed to adddvb-usb-vp7045 to /etc/modules
- Needed to addoptions dvb-usb disable_rc_polling=1 to /etc/modprobe.d/dvbt.conf otherwise the RC sensor picked up lots of rubbish and did random controls in XBMC

- Reliability has been 100%

*Kworld UB499-2T Dual Tuner* - Needed to adddvb-usb-it913x pid=1 to /etc/modules
- Needed to Tick "Disable PMT monitoring:" on Kworld UB499-2T T09(IT9137)_1 and Kworld UB499-2T T09(IT9137)_2

- Reliability has been 98%. Actual recordings 100% but occasionally when recording BBC Four you can't get audio when trying to watch BBC Four live at the same time. The recording does HAVE audio though.

DVB-S

*Technotrend S-2400* - Plugged it in, rebooted, all working, simplest setup yet.
- Identified as "Philips TDA10086 DVB-S"
- Have disabled "Disable PMT monitoring", but no idea if it's needed
- Monitoring signal quality and idle scanning are working fine
- Reliability (over five days) has been 100% - a tad slower to change channel than the (awful) DM04 or any of my DVB-T tuners, but not annoyingly slow (and still faster than my DVB-T TV!)
- HD channels play fine
- Only slight drawback is it comes with a Europlug wall-wart which was an awkward shape to plug in adjacent to standard UK plug once a Schuko adaptor was added into the mix.

- DVB-S only so no BBC HD (which is DVB-S2) but you can get the Granada and London versions of ITV-HD, Channel 4 HD, and Five HD (plus RT HD and NHK World HD) which are broadcast on DVB-S

And one DO NOT BUY ME recommendation

*DM04* £15 tuner from ebay - took 10 weeks for delivery, and ages to get working
- Needed to adddvb-usb-lmedm04 firmware=4 pid=1 to /etc/modules
- Also needed to download and recompile the drivers removing the line #echo -ne \\xF0\\x22 | dd conv=notrunc bs=1 count=2 seek=266 of=dvb-usb-lme2510c-rs2000.fw from the file. (Alas the site I got these from is long gone :( )
- For no apparent reason the tuner stops getting lock after a while - needs to stop TVHeadend, remove the USB cable (not power), start TVHeadend
- Reliability 5%
- HD channels appear to drop frames, assumed it was the Revo until I got the Technotrend above!

- Do NOT buy this

Rob vh

Digital Devices Octopus (PCIe) with 3 times DuoFlex S2
Works using the standard drivers.

Ron L

DVB-S2

Using Prof 7301 PCI.

Will work with the default kernel drivers but they have a bug that prevents the card from locking on high bitrate muxes. Some where in the range of 65Mbps and up. So I use it with these patched drivers instead....

https://bitbucket.org/updatelee/s2-liplianin-v37-udl

Very good tuner. Locks weak signals well. Tunes quickly. It does Blindscan. The udl driver tree also has patches for using the Prof 7301, 7500 and TBS 6925 as a spectrum analyser with his stv090x-scan app and the 7301 works well for this. Makes it easy to find satellites and watch for backhaul feeds.

Mario Zivkovic

wet willy wrote:
> Hauppauge PCTV Nanostick T2 HD 290e
>
> This USB-tuner supports both DVB-T2 and DVB-C by creating one frontend for each, /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 and frontend1.
>

> Tvheadend will only work with one of the frontend at a time, I have only tried out the DVB-T2 frontend and it looks nice.

Hello
How long do you test this tv-stick with tvheadend?
Do you have any troubles by watching DVB-T?

Maybe I want to buy it and im looking for a stable working tv-card/stick.

Thanks & regards
Mario

tsoi fun

Which PCI or USB HD card from http://www.tbsdtv.com/ could be recommended?
I have now SATELCO EASYWATCH HDTV PCI, which does not lock on HD channels in Ubuntu 12.04 and consequently it does not show any HD channels scanned in TVHEADEND. I tried all possible drivers - stock from ubuntu, liplianin. So wanna change it to something really HD.

Kev S

tsoi fun wrote:
> Which PCI or USB HD card from http://www.tbsdtv.com/ could be recommended?

> I have now SATELCO EASYWATCH HDTV PCI, which does not lock on HD channels in Ubuntu 12.04 and consequently it does not show any HD channels scanned in TVHEADEND. I tried all possible drivers - stock from ubuntu, liplianin. So wanna change it to something really HD.

Which country are you in?

Which platform are you using e.g. DVB-S, DVB-T, DVB-C?

In many countries (including the UK) HD channels are broadcast in the DVB-T2 and DVB-S2 standards which may explain why you are not able to get the HD services.

tsoi fun

Sorry for omission - I'd like to change SATELCO for watching HD channels from satellites and have two cards DVB-S and this satelco said to be DVB- S2. Has no intention to watch local DVB-T.

Ron L

I know of quite a few who use the TBS 6925 cards and are happy with those. They are a PCIe card and one of the few that do 16 and 32 APSK. Also have an open source driver working now. They are fairly expensive. Cheaper ones are the 6922 PCIe and 8922 PCI that do QPSK and 8PSK only. For an S2 PCI card that does QPSK and 8PSK it's pretty hard to beat the PROF 7301. We have some patches for the PROF 7301 and TBS 6925 in North America that add a lot to the functionality of these cards.

tsoi fun

Ron L wrote:
> I know of quite a few who use the TBS 6925 cards and are happy with those. They are a PCIe card and one of the few that do 16 and 32 APSK. Also have an open source driver working now. They are fairly expensive. Cheaper ones are the 6922 PCIe and 8922 PCI that do QPSK and 8PSK only. For an S2 PCI card that does QPSK and 8PSK it's pretty hard to beat the PROF 7301. We have some patches for the PROF 7301 and TBS 6925 in North America that add a lot to the functionality of these cards.
-------------------
Thanks for answers. I was looking for PCI or USB card. Noted your recommendation on PROF 7301 but I don't need double tuner adaptor. Any thoughts about PROF 7300? Seen that PROF made their own linux drivers for PROF 7300 which people say are quite good from one side but other say also that this PROF 7300 has problems with power supply.

Graeme Russ

I'm using a DigitalNow Quad DVB-T Receiver (http://www.digitalnow.com.au/product_pages/Quad.html). It's a PCIe USB Bridge card. Being a quad tuner, it does need a strong, healthy signal

Drivers are mainlined in latest Linux kernels (works out-of-the-box with Fedora 18)

I'm having a little bit of trouble getting Tvheadend to find ABC and SBS channels (Australia) but apart from that, everything worked perfectly

Peter Vágner

Martin Bednar wrote:
> DVB-T : "Evolve Venus" Based on the af9015 chip works pretty well (dvb_usb_af9015 module). I'd give it bronze rating :
> The dual adapter feature works > logs full of i2c read/write errors, and from time to time the adapter needs to be hotplugged.
> * You need to get firmware manually.

I am also looking for a dual dvb-t usb tuner device.
This one appears to be the most available here in shops however if possible I would like to get something what is working really well.

Can you recommend me something else to compare this evolveo dual tuner with?

Greetings

Peter

Robert H

Shows up as :Montage Technology DS3000/TS2020 The Good: plug and play with openelec 2.99.4 and 3.0 (tvheadend 3.3.491)
both SD and HD reception perfect

fast chanel change

The Bad:

none yet but it was not plug and play on older linux kernals when i used to use openelec 2.0 (tvheadend 3.2)

Also have used a PCTV DVB-S2 stick 460e not in use at the moment so cant say what its detected as
The Good: plug and play with openelec 2 and 3

both SD and HD reception perfect

The Bad: USB so needs external power. a minus if you worry a neet build.
gets a little warm but not alarmingly hot.

Anonymous

First, I run tvheadend (TVH) on a virtual machine. The host is a vmware ESXi 5.0 system and I have opted for USB devices owing to the limited number of available PCIe slots for pass through. Currently running Ubuntu 12.10 with all updates from standard repos.

Hauppauge Win TV Duet - dual DVB-T tuner

This has worked consistently well. Never had any problems at all.

PCTV 290e - DVB-T2 tuner

Sometimes a bit fussy following a restart (although I now think this may just be a timing issue with TVH starting too soon). Generally been very reliable and has been heavily used for FreeView HD (UK) content.

PCTV 460e - DVB-S2 tuner

This is new but so far seems to be working very well.

TeVii S660 - DVB-S2 tuner

Works fine in Windows. Never worked reliably in Linux, even on dedicated physical hardware. Others have had better luck but I've wasted an enormous amount of time for little result.

I am now running the WinTV Duet, 290e & 460e in a single TVH instance without problem so far. I am running a very recent TVH build (from master).

Ryan P

Currently using
3x Afatech AF9013 USB branded as Leadtek DTV Dongle Gold
Ubuntu 12.04

TVH 3.4

Worked for 2 years perfectly well on Ubuntu 10.04 with TVH 2.12 with the occasional audio encode failure and the occasional missed recording. No such issues with 12.04 and 3.4 as yet.

Justin Case

This is a combined question because I am not only unclear if the following hardware will run with TVHeadend 3.4 but also on unRAID 5rc11 (Linux unRAID 3.0.33), which is basically Slackware. Does the unRAID and TVHeadEnd need kernel support to use the tuner cards I have chosen (below)?

I am going to buy TV tuner PCIe (!!) cards to have 2 DVB-C tuners. If a card has only 1 tuner I will buy two of them. An onboard CI-Card slot is not necessary because I will have an external USB solution for that anyway.

If you have experience with any of the following boards it would be great if you would share it (sorry the links are for Amazon Germany):

Digital Devices Cine C/T

http://www.digitaldevices.de/english/Cine_CT.html

2xC

160 EUR

TBS 6680

https://www.tbs-technology.de/shop/product_info.php?products_id=29&MODsid=d88e3132a60e72837549b062b3d9a3df

2xC + 2xCI

154 EUR

TBS 6618

http://www.amazon.de/TBS-DVB-C-Single-Tuner-Kabel-HDTV-Empfangskarte/dp/B008HP544C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370783210&sr=8-1&keywords=TBS+6618

1xC + CI

90 EUR

DVBSky T9580

http://www.amazon.de/DVBSky-DVB-S2-bootf%C3%A4higem-Terrestrisch-Empfang/dp/B00C6A2RXU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370783146&sr=8-1&keywords=DVBSky+T9580

1xC,1xS,1xT sat, 1x

80 EUR

DVBSky T980C

http://www.amazon.de/DVBSky-bootf%C3%A4higem-Terrestrisch-Empfangskarte-Nachfolger/dp/B00C6A2PBO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370783048&sr=8-1&keywords=DVBSky+T980C

1xC + CI

100 EUR

DVBSky C2800

http://www.amazon.de/DVBSky-bootf%C3%A4higem-Empfangskarte-brandneuer-innovativen/dp/B008JA7PFG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370783091&sr=8-1&keywords=DVBSky+C2800E

1xC + CI
85 EUR

Rob Hunter

TBS6981

Some users are experiencing difficulties. In my case on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS with the last few iterations of TBS drivers and the last few versions of Tvheadend on a Q6600 / Asus P5K Premium.

If using both frontends simultaneously there is a strong chance a channel change will fail.

See https://tvheadend.org/d/1175-tbs6981-issues-with-both-adaptors-enabled?r=8752

Since I've reported the problem at least one other person has purchased the adaptor and had the same problem so I think it is fair to warn prospective buyers for now.

Any further positive or negative experience would be welcome on the above (fairly detailed) thread as I am trying to see if TBS can get a handle on the situation.

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