Pinnacle PCTV 200e

The Pinnacle PCTV 200e is a DVB-T highspeed USB 2.0 adapter with an active antenna. It was first presented on the CeBIT 2005, and still available for about EUR 40,-.

Under Windows it can be used with alternative DVB software thanks to existing BDA drivers, while under GNU\Linux support is still missing, although both the frontend MT352 and the tuner MT2060 are already supported by LinuxTV.

The PCTV 200e is identical to the PCTV 260e, the PCTV 60e and the "PCTV DVB-T Pro USB".

Current Status

As of June 2007 the driver is currently being written/debugged. Everyone who wants to help, can do so. Just contact the LinuxTV mailing list, or contact the developer on the LinuxTV IRC (his nick: freez).

Current Tasks

• find out why the device is not giving the expected answers (maybe torture will help?)

Comments

Juan Garcia (juanantonio_garcia_01@yahoo.es):

I would like to contact someone developing also the driver to share information, and to give a kick to the driver forward. I am heavily torturing the device...

• I have submitted a patch to the linux-dvd distribution list I think solving the "NULL pointer dereference"

• I am getting initial answers from the device. I am able to attach the mt352 (demod).

It seems that the first byte to send on the USB for reading is "0x02". For example with these sequence:

0x10 0x00

0x15 0x00

0x16 0x01

0x02 0x3e 0x01 0x01 0x7f

I can read the mt352 CHIP_ID and register the mt352.

The:

0x10 0x00

0x15 0x00

0x16 0x01

Seems to be needed, otherwise I don't get the right answer if I don't send those first.

The answer is: 0x02 0x00 0x13

So the 3rd byte is the value of the register, 0x13 is the right CHIP_ID.

Source Code

The source code is available at mrec's site: (currently outdated.)

http://mcentral.de/hg/~mrec/v4l-dvb-pinnacle200e

Stuff that might be useful

• usbsnoop_pctv200e.log.bz2 (compressed ~94MB)
• lsusb.log

Further Information

• PCTV 200e on the DVB_USB page
• Product Page