Michaels blog

I was not happy with the quality of my analogue TV signal, so i finally decided to buy a DVB-C card to receive digital TV from my provider in Denmark, TDC Kabel TV.

To receive the signal you need a DVB-C card. To receive non-free-to-air channels you need a Common Interface (CI) and a CAM (Common Access Module) to decode the signal. In the CAM you must insert a decoder card bought from your provider.

I ended up ordering the following at dvbshop.net:

• Technotrend Premium C-2300 Hybrid
• Technotrend Premium 3.5″ CI incl. TT-remotecontrol
• Viaccess I/II CAM (V484)

I have no use for the remote control, but could not find a CI for the C-2300 card without it.

The card was pretty easy to get working in Linux. When I first booted after inserting the card, the kernel log showed:

[ 57.704473] dvb-ttpci: could not load firmware, file not found: dvb-ttpci-01.fw
[ 57.704509] dvb-ttpci: usually this should be in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware or /lib/firmware
[ 57.704550] dvb-ttpci: and can be downloaded from http://www.linuxtv.org/download/dvb/firmware/

So i downloaded http://www.linuxtv.org/download/dvb/firmware/dvb-ttpci-01.fw-2622 and saved it as /lib/firmware/dvb-ttpci-01.fw and reloaded the driver:

# rmmod dvb-ttpci
# modprobe dvb-ttpci
and the card was now detected and initialized just fine:

[ 571.805460] saa7146: register extension 'dvb'.
[ 571.806038] PCI: Enabling device 0000:05:07.0 (0000 -> 0002)
[ 571.806223] saa7146: found saa7146 @ mem ffffc20000070000 (revision 1, irq 3) (0x13c2,0x000a).
[ 571.812619] DVB: registering new adapter (Technotrend/Hauppauge WinTV Nexus-CA rev1.X).
[ 571.846734] adapter has MAC addr = 00:d0:5c:04:ae:d4
[ 572.052113] dvb-ttpci: gpioirq unknown type=0 len=0
[ 572.077680] dvb-ttpci: info @ card 0: firm f0240009, rtsl b0250018, vid 71010068, app 80002622
[ 572.077683] dvb-ttpci: firmware @ card 0 supports CI link layer interface
[ 572.725120] dvb-ttpci: DVB-C analog module @ card 0 detected, initializing MSP3415
[ 573.072477] dvb_ttpci: saa7113 not accessible.
[ 573.133828] saa7146_vv: saa7146 (0): registered device video2 [v4l2]
[ 573.134080] saa7146_vv: saa7146 (0): registered device vbi2 [v4l2]
[ 573.134357] DVB: registering frontend 0 (ST STV0297 DVB-C)...
[ 573.134549] input: DVB on-card IR receiver as /class/input/input3
[ 573.134630] dvb-ttpci: found av7110-0.
[ 577.936266] spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.

To test and scan for channels I created a file called dk-TDCKabelTV containing the frequences used by TDC Kabel TV in Copenhagen:

C 143000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 156000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 490000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 498000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 506000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 514000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 522000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 530000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 538000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 546000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 554000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 578000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 586000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 602000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 610000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 618000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 626000000 6875000 NONE QAM64
C 674000000 6875000 NONE QAM64


I then used scan dk-TDCKabelTV > channels.conf to scan for channels. I later used the generated file when setting up the tuner card in MythTV. I had to delete a lot of channels though. It looks like MythTV cannot handle the radio channels – and I haven’t bought access to all 100 channels or so available with TDCs Selector…

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 17:06 and is filed under Linux, Media Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.