[linux-dvb] Re: WinTV Nova-T PCI

[Wolfgang Wershofen <wolfgang@wershofen.com>]

Donnerstag, 5. September 2002 at 09:41 Holger Waechtler wrote:

> please use the simple szap, czap or tzap test programs to verify a
> working driver first. The channel list format is pretty straightforward, 
> you can easily create a test list with some of your local transmitters.

> I verified the driver with both the NOVA-S cards and different revisions
> of the full featured DVB-S cards.

> If anybody encounters problems with a specific card revision please report.

Thanx, Holger, for "tuning" into this problem. ;-)

I use a Technotrend budget PCI DVB-card (Sat-dish pointing towards Astra
19,2E) which is fully working with drivers taken from CVS on May, 21st.
Fully working means, I can use any tuning utility (dvbtune, szap,
tuxzap) to tune the card to any desired frequency and ip-networking
(multicast and unicast) as well as watching TV with mplayer (fed with
ts2ps /dev/ost/dvr) works without any problems.

Mainly, I use the card to do IP-networking with "T-DSL via Satellite"
and therefore prefer using dvbtune because of the -n switch, which brings
up the network interface automatically after tuning the card.
When watching tv, I use ntuxzap with the -e switch to enable dvr and
then piping ts2ps /dev/ost/dvr to mplayer.

On July, 29th, I tried to upgrade my drivers to CVS and realized, that
tuning with dvbtune does not work anymore. Since then I tried a few more
times with different CVS-versions to get things working, but failed
every time. Dave Chapman suggested to switch to the driver's
NEWSTRUCT-branch and try the latest dvbtune-version from CVS -
without any success.

As you suggested, today I tried tuning with szap.
At first, I used it with the known-to-work drivers from May. Tuning
worked on every tv-channel I tried and also tuning to TDSLvS (freq:
10773.250 H, Symbolrate: 22000 kHz) was successfull. I brought up the
network interface with the network_activator tool and was able to
receive ip-packets over dvb0_0. So far, so good.

Next step was using "OLDSTRUCT" drivers from yesterdays CVS-snapshot.
I discovered, that I could not tune to all channels. It seems to depend
what channel I switch from and if drivers are freshly loaded or not. I
did not see any reliable pattern, which channels under which
circumstances work and which do not. The only stable impression is: I
can not tune to TDSLvS! I get "tuning failed" everytime I try.
As szap does not open the /dev/ost/dvr, I can't tell you, if
tv-reception is working or not. I don't know how to envoke the
software-MPEG-Decoder ts2ps without /dev/ost/dvr.
So I tried ntuxzap -e but got a message "setfront front: Bad file
descriptor" when I tried to tune to a channel. Obviously, the tuxzap
tools aren't working anymore, too.

Last step up to now: Using the "NEWSTRUCT" drivers from September, 3rd.
Since szap has changed a lot in the NEWSTRUCT-branch, I can't tell you,
if things are working or not. As I understand from the frontend.tex
documentation, tuning does not work because of the status codes printed
out by check_frontend. Most of the time, I get status 03 (which I think
is FE_HAS_POWER and FE_HAS_SIGNAL), sometimes status 07 (+
FE_SPECTRUM_INV) and very few times status 1f (+ FE_HAS_LOCK,
FE_HAS_CARRIER).


These are my results up to now. My impression is, that tuning of a TT
budget PCI card isn't at least reliable and completely doesn't work with
the NEWSTRUCT drivers. Do you have any suggestions, what else I could
try to find a solution? If you need some more system information, I'd be
glad to provide you with that. Just tell me what you need.

Sorry for the length of this posting and thanx for your help.

-- 
Best regards
Wolfgang Wershofen                            mailto:wolfgang@wershofen.com



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