EzCap DVB T Stick

Afatech USB 2.0 DVB-T Stick is a USB 2.0 DVB-T device.

Note: There is also a card with exactly same ID data , hence based on same hardware, just rebranded, sold as Infinity Nano brand (at least in Croatia). This is a best buy model. Procedure for geting this DVB stick working is described below inside NOTE blocks. If your stick is not Infinity Nano, disregard this comments.

Currently not supported by LinuxTV. No manufacturer website.

Based on:

• Afatech AF9035
• Fiti Power FC0011

Install instructions for using alternate manufacturer driver

This is provided by Andreas Mattsson and lifted (mostly) verbatim from his website [1].

Note for Infinity Nano : Infinity Nano instructions were written by User:Phantom25, after painfull try&mistake process lasting three days with final success. Data aquired by mixing Andreas Mattson website data, Ubuntu Forums [2] and trial&error experiments. End note for Infinity Nano

This is a simple how-to in order to quickly get up and running if you've got a card based on this combination. As of 20100123, the LinuxTV-project doesn't support this yet and I have not found any working instructions anywhere, only questions about how to get it to work. I'm running Xubuntu and will thus be using apt, but the instructions should work for most any distribution if you fix the dependencies in another way. Most cards with the AF9035 seems to be combined with the Infineon TUA9001 tuner, with vendor supplied Linux-drivers that only support this tuner. For instance, TerraTec_Cinergy_T_Stick driver in the archive "terratec_af9035.zip" available via their linux-driver site is one such driver. Luckily, they also have an older driver version where they have sourcecode supporting the FC0011 tuner in place. As a matter of fact, there's support for a whole bunch of tuners in there, like Microtune MT2266, Philips TDA18291 and of course Infineon TUA9001. We're going to use this. You can't find it via their web-page, but it's still available.

First up, you'll need a working build environment, the kernel-headers and the kernel-source. If you don't know which kernel you're running, you can find out with

uname -r

For instance, I've installed

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.31-17-generic linux-source-2.6.31 kernel-package

Continue with downloading the needed driver-file from Terratec.

wget http://linux.terratec.de/files/Linux-Driver-for-T-Stick.rar

Note for Infinity Nano : The mentioned URL is an outdated driver, and does improperly support this card (module error -12). Newer version (Year 2009 instead of year 2008) is on:

wget http://www.linux-cam.com/downloads/9035.linux.PC.dvb-tV9.07.10.1.zip

End note for Infinity Nano

In order to unpack the archives, you'll need rar and rpm. (Actually, I'm not sure about rpm. You'll at least need the rpm2cpio which I think comes with the rpm package).

sudo apt-get install rar rpm

then

rar x Linux-Driver-for-T-Stick.rar
cd Linux_PC_AF9035_Afatech_2008.12.17/Linux-32bit_AF9035_20081217
rpm2cpio AF903x-32bit-2.0-1.src.rpm | cpio -idmv
tar -xzf AF903x_SRC.tar.gz

Note for Infinity Nano : The mentioned URL is an outdated driver, and does inproperly support this card. The newer driver needs to be unpacked via unzip, instead using rar, replace the procedure with:

unzip 9035.linux.PC.dvb-tV9.07.10.1.zip
cd 32bit
tar -xzf AF903x_SRC.tar.gz

End note for Infinity Nano

There! Now we got a folder called AF903x_SRC containing the source for the driver. If you're running a kernel version between 2.6.16 and 2.6.27, all you should have to do is to compile and install the driver, although I haven't actually tested this. I'm running 2.6.31, so I had to manually copy a few files. Enter AF903x_SRC and copy the following files there. (I've unpacked my kernel source into /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31)

cd AF903x_SRC
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/demux.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dmxdev.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dvb_demux.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dvb_frontend.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dvb_net.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dvb_ringbuffer.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dvbdev.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-usb/dvb-usb.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-usb/dvb-usb-ids.h ./
cp /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/drivers/media/dvb/frontends/dvb-pll.h ./

Now we're ready to make and install...

make
sudo make install
depmod -a

reboot or do a

modprobe dvb_af903x

Note for Infinity Nano :The module name has been changed, use instead:

modprobe dvb-usb-af903x

USB hotpluging should start working immediately, however, some Linuxes wrong identify this stick as USB HID device, due to conflicting ID woth some possibly existing HID device !??????? Therefore, further steps should be neccessary. Please see below. End note for Infinity Nano

If you run

cat /var/log/messages | grep DVB

you should see

dvb-usb: found a 'Afatech USB2.0 DVB-T Recevier' in warm state.
DVB: registering new adapter (Afatech USB2.0 DVB-T Recevier)
DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (AF903X USB DVB-T)...
dvb-usb: Afatech USB2.0 DVB-T Recevier successfully initialized and connected.

Your Afatech USB card is now ready to be used. Happyhappyjoyjoy! =)

Beware if you have more than one DVB adapter, though. It seem like the dvb_af903x driver can't tune if it isn't adapter 0, at least not in my system. In my case, I also have a Hauppauge PCI DVB-T card that always got installed as adapter 0, with the Afatech as adapter 1. With the Hauppauge card installed, the Afatech would always fail at tuning. With it removed, it worked. I got around this by blacklisting the cx88_dvb, cx88xx, cx8800 and cx8802 modules and loading them manually after the dvb_af903x had loaded. Now, with the Afatech as adapter 0 and the Hauppauge as adapter 1, both work great.

Might simply be some specific incompatability between the Hauppauge driver and the Afatech, but I thought a heads up might be in place.

General important note! USB DVB is wrongly identified as a HID device

Most Linuxes improperly identify this USB stick as USB HID, which it is not! This leads to driver conflicts. When looking into:

dmesg

There is mention of a HID device, by default, after plugging in the stick.

This has to be done, in order to remedy this:

• 1. /etc/modprobe.d/usbhid.conf needs to have the line (for module version):

options usbhid quirks=0x15a4:0x1001:0x0004

This line ignores this ID from HID devices! Should you posess another USB device, which is HID, i.e. keyboard, mouse (funny, this should never have happened to the specification, that two or more devices share the same ID!)

• 2. if HID driver is incorporated into kernel, these boot parameters must be appended:

usbhid.quirks=0x15a4:0x1001:0x0004

this goes in, i.e. /boot/grub/menu.lst (grub.conf) , or other means of linux bootconfig.

• 3. Reboot, just in case. :) Or, unload and reload the usbhid module, in order for the changes to take effect!

Happy TV-viewing.

References

• http://www.szforwardvideo.com/support/Supp_32_4.html