FAQ & Troubleshooting

FAQ

General

What card do I exactly have?

Good question - those companies often just don't tell it exactly... The easiest is to do stick the card into your PC and then do

 lspci

Watch out for multimedia apaters, multimedia video controller, multimedia controller or something thelike.

Where do I get a driver from?

Write down the name in lspci and search for it here or google for it. There are many cards out, but most of them use the same chipset so you're pretty likely to get it running under Linux.

I have the DVB drivers loaded. Now how can I test it?

Check if you have files in /dev/dvb/adapter0/. Then, have a look at the tests on First steps with a DVB device.

How do I tune my TV-channels? Where do I get the frequencies from?

Try the scan command as described above or on the page of its package LinuxTV dvb-apps.

Troubleshooting

Any software I use comes up with error messages like "can't find demux".

This means that /dev/dvb/adapter0/demux is missing. Probably your card drivers are not installed properly. Then, you don't have anything in /dev/dvb/. If that's the case, make sure above that you have all in your kernel config (of your running kernel, of course) and that you loaded them all with modprobe.

My device was working perfectly, but now it is not recognized anymore. What is the problem?

It's possible that you're using a different kernel now, so you have to install the driver again and ensure that the firmware is reached by the hotplug system.

My DVB device is recognized but I'm not able to use it. What can I do?

You should check that the /dev/dvb exists and that you have the correct permissions to read and write that directory.

You might also try some of the First steps with a DVB device to see if other software can cope with it.

For further please contact developers via irc.freenode.net on #linuxtv (or #dvb) or via mailing list.