TerraTec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T

I'd like to tell you the following experiences I have made with Cinergy 1400 DVB-T, which is a PCI card.

I got it working on Mandrake 10.1 with a 2.6.14 kernel configured. 2.6.12 and the standard 2.6.8 kernel did not work. I configured the kernel with make oldconfig and the options under Device Drivers -> Multimedia -> Video4Linux -> Connexant 2388 and DVB support for cx2388x based cards. After booting I made a "modprobe cx88-dvb", which is the only kernel module to be started. I did not manage to get it loaded from /etc/modules during boot.

With this module loaded, I had the device nodes created under /dev/dvb/adapter0. Kaffeine 0.7.1 then recognized the dvb card and presented me a configure dialog after starting, in which I was able to tell kaffeine to use a "de-Koeln-Bonn" setting (for DVB in Cologne).

In the menu "DVB" I chose "Channels" and made a "Start scan". Kaffeine finds the channels itself, so I did not need to find a channels.conf or something.

Afterwards I was able to switch channels by menu "DVB" and (great) - without doing anything else - by infrared, which comes with the card. In "Configuring Shortcuts" I was able to configure some other actions for the infrared, but kaffeine does not recognize all buttons.

Pro:

• Very good and fluent picture, good sound, with kaffeine (on a 1GHz Athlon machine)
• Very quick zapping with kaffeine
• Timeshifting works without trouble
• Recording (instantly and timed) works with kaffeine
• OSD working

Contra:

• I need kernel 2.6.14, which is awfully slow booting (boot time increased from 1 minute to 10)
• Infrared only partly supported. I wonder if there are people out there understanding lirc...
• No teletext
• Antenna-Out not working

(March 27, 2006) Beside DVB-T (worked automagically in Fedora Core 4), this Terratec card also has an S-Video/Composite (adapter included) input connector: unfortunately, it does not work. There is a patch on the video4linux mailing list which makes those inputs selectable, but result is only a b/w image in S-Video mode, no image in Composite mode.

(June 2, 2006) The infrared remote works perfectly. The needed configuration file for lirc should be available soon in the official place [1], for the time being it can be downloaded from [2]