LifeView FlyDVB-T Duo

LifeView presents the FlyDVB-T Duo!

User experiences

• The card runs fine with Fedora Core 6 and DVB-T. The analog receiving I did not try yet.
• With kubuntu 7.10, it works fine too, even watching analog TV. Tested with German cable TV.
• A problem I had, was to recognize, that I had to load '/sbin/modprobe saa7134_dvb' additional to '/sbin/modprobe saa7134', which was running fine. Afterwards the script http://www.fedoralinux.de/comment/reply/660/1605 helped a lot. Got the device major number with '/sbin/lsmod | grep saa'. Thanks!
• Working under Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. My experiences are listed in the mini-howto.

Mini-howto

Basically, everything 'works' out of the box, but actually getting access to things can be trickier.

FM Radio

Tuners like gradio, gnomeradio and radio work fine. Because the card doesn't have an audio out, it acts as a sound card. If you use alsa, use something like this to get output:

arecord -D hw:1,0 -r 32000 -c 2 -f S16_LE | aplay -

or:

arecord -D hw:1,0 -r 32000 -c 2 -f S16_LE | sox -q -c 2 -r 32000 -w -t wav - -t alsa default

What this does is record from the 2nd sound card (hw:1,0), and pipe the output into aplay (or sox) which'll play it on the default sound card. Note you'll need to set up the input to record from. Do this in GNOME mixer or via alsamixer

Remote Control

This is actually pretty straight forward. The kernel sees the remote as an input device and assigns it a location in /dev/input. Interestingly it also recognises it as a keyboard, and you can use it to type numbers 0-9 and enter. It also recognises SOME buttons as keyboard media buttons, e.g. the play/pause buttons, volup/voldown, mute, etc. This is pretty nifty, and if it's what you need, just go into the GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts app and assign keyboard shortcuts.

If you need more control, you can use LIRC. If you're compiling, you'll need support for devinput. Set it to the right event in the config file.

For the remote file (lircd.conf) I made my own (I couldn't find one in t'internet). Here it is:

# Please make this file available to others
# by sending it to <lirc@bartelmus.de>
#
# this config file was automatically generated
# using lirc-0.8.3pre1(devinput) on Sat Oct  4 19:37:18 2008
#
# contributed by Barney Gale (Stormx) 
#
# brand: LifeView
# devices being controlled by this remote: FlyDVB-T Duo (PCI)
#

begin remote

  name  flydvb-t_duo
  bits           16
  flags SPACE_ENC|CONST_LENGTH
  eps            30
  aeps          100

  header       9000  4500
  one           563  1687
  zero          563   562
  ptrail        563
  repeat       9000  4500
  pre_data_bits   16
  pre_data       0x8001
  gap          207854
  toggle_bit_mask 0x8001001C
  frequency    37916
  duty_cycle   33

      begin codes
          1                    0x0002
          2                    0x0003
          3                    0x0004
          4                    0x0005
          5                    0x0006
          6                    0x0007
          7                    0x0008
          8                    0x0009
          9                    0x000A
          0                    0x000B
          enter                0x001C
          mute                 0x0071
          voldown              0x0072
          volup                0x0073
          power                0x0074
          timeshiftpause       0x0077
          stop                 0x0080
          recall               0x0081
          rewind               0x009E
          forward              0x009F
          playpause            0x00A4
          recordpause          0x00A7
          sap                  0x0170
          empty                0x0173
          fullscreen           0x0174
          pip                  0x0175
          tvradio              0x0181
          source               0x0182
          chanup               0x0192
          chandown             0x0193
          end                  0x0197
          back                 0x019C
      end codes

end remote

Then follow one of the hundreds of guides for setting up lircrc!

Note that running irw seems to block the input device, so if you want it to stop acting like a keyboard, just set "irw &" to run on startup!

Digital Input

TV Time didn't pick anything up :( However kaffiene did. The signal is low but I think thats my wiring. The colour is completely off, not sure how to fix this yet!

Analogue Input

Works fine with TV Time, picks up 3 channels at okay quality (should be picking up 4 but the signal is low)

Misc

My dmesg output:

[   46.667236] saa7133[0]: found at 0000:04:06.0, rev: 209, irq: 16, latency: 32, mmio: 0xefeff000
[   46.667240] saa7133[0]: subsystem: 5168:0306, board: LifeView FlyDVB-T DUO / MSI TV@nywhere Duo [card=55,autodetected]
[   46.667247] saa7133[0]: board init: gpio is 210000
[   46.667290] input: saa7134 IR (LifeView FlyDVB-T D as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0f.0/0000:04:06.0/input/input6
[   46.857495] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 00: 68 51 06 03 54 20 1c 00 43 43 a9 1c 55 d2 b2 92
[   46.857501] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 10: 00 ff a6 0f ff 20 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[   46.857505] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 20: 01 40 01 02 03 ff 01 03 08 ff 01 2d ff ff ff ff
[   46.857509] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 30: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[   46.857513] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 40: ff 1c 00 c0 ff 10 07 01 c2 96 01 16 30 15 ff ff
[   46.857517] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 50: ff 00 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[   46.857521] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 60: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[   46.857525] saa7133[0]: i2c eeprom 70: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[   46.961967] tuner 2-004b: chip found @ 0x96 (saa7133[0])
[   47.009973] tda8290 2-004b: setting tuner address to 61
[   47.121914] tuner 2-004b: type set to tda8290+75
[   47.169893] tda8290 2-004b: setting tuner address to 61
[   47.273860] tuner 2-004b: type set to tda8290+75
[   47.276183] saa7133[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
[   47.276195] saa7133[0]: registered device vbi0
[   47.276206] saa7133[0]: registered device radio0
[   47.340575] saa7134 ALSA driver for DMA sound loaded
[   47.340592] saa7133[0]/alsa: saa7133[0] at 0xefeff000 irq 16 registered as card -2
[   47.409185] DVB: registering new adapter (saa7133[0])
[   47.409188] DVB: registering frontend 0 (Philips TDA10046H DVB-T)...

External Links

• [1] LR306TA