TechniSat AirStar-HD5000-PCI

An ATSC PCI card by TechniSat.

The AirStar-HD5000 card is well supported under Linux (added to kernel 2.6.15).

Overview/Features

This ATSC PCI card offering from TechniSat, superseded their older Air2PC models.

Origin of the Device's Name

TechniSat never listed this device on their own website's product pages. Rather, one finds information about this ATSC device strictly on the BBTI website (TechniSat's source for North American sales and distribution).

Previous ATSC products manufactured by TechniSat, but marketed by BBTI, retained the naming scheme given to them by their original reference device designer, B2C2; as opposed to being marketed by way of TechinSat's "*Stars" product lineup nomenclature. With the HD5000 products, BBTI has evidently now adopted the TechniSat convention into part of the device names.

However, why they actually elected to use "HD5000" within the product name is a minor curiosity. In doing so, BBTI/TechniSat was likely, in part, trying to capitalize on the prevalent marketing hype for the "LG 5th Gen" demodulator. Nonetheless, the nomenclature choice is quite similar to the naming conventions used by competitor pcHDTV. Indeed, it is quite possible that pcHDTV would have liked to have used "HD-5000" as a successor to their earlier product offerings (the HD-2000 and HD-3000), but ended going with HD-5500 due to the fact that BBTI/TechniSat had already released a card to market bearing, in part, a "HD5000" moniker.

Components Used

• LG H061F (NIM) featuring:
  • Infineon TUA6034 (tuner)
  • Philips TDA9887 (analog IF demodulator)
  • LG DT3303 (digital demodulator)
• B2C2 Inc. FlexCop (PCI interface chipset)

Identification

Output of lspci -vnn:

Why are they listed as a "network controller" and not a "multimedia controller" in the output of dmesg or lspci?

In reality, DTV devices are little more then network interfaces. Many happen to also support some form of analog input (TV-in or A/V in), and so use an A/V decoder to digitize the analog input signals. The A/V decoder also serves a second purpose as being a bridge to the PCI bus for both the digital signals and the digitized content (from the analog inputs) that the card receives. This is why these such devices will show up as a "multimedia controller". However, in the case of the Air2PC cards, instead of an A/V decoder, they utilize the B2C2 FlexCop IC for a bridge to the PCI bus. The FlexCop PCI interface chipset completely lacks any analog input functionality, and this explains not only why these cards are barren of analog inputs, but also why they appear in dmesg or lspci output only as a "network controller".

External Links

• BBTI product page
• Technisat International
• B2C2 Inc.