Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T-500

What is it?

This is a Hauppauge Dual-tuner PCI card.

It's actually a USB device, with the host USB controller and USB dual-tuner on a single PCI card. There aren't any real USB plugs or sockets involved. See DVB_USB for further details

Disconnects

Some cards suffer from a serious problem. The USB DVB-T tuners seem to occasionally "disconnect" and reconnect during a tuning operation. In Linux 2.6.21 and earlier, this causes the kernel to oops requiring a reboot. With an old series of patches 1 2 3 (not needed anymore) then you won't get a kernel oops - instead, your Linux DVB application will just stop working. Exiting and restarting your application (more accurately, closing all the LinuxDVB devices and then waiting a second) should make everything work again.

Someone has 2 of these, which are different revisions of the board. This one is rock solid:

$ lspci
00:13.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 61)
00:13.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 61)
00:13.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 63)

This one has the random USB disconnects problem:

$ lspci
00:13.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 62)
00:13.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 62)
00:13.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 65)

Note that USB controller chip is a different revision number.

There are now patches that should fix this. See below.

Scanning

Scanning (or tuning with any AUTO parameters) is known to be broken in kernel 2.6.20, and probably earlier kernels too. Fixed in kernel 2.6.21; try [this patch] for older kernels.

Remote control

Grey top, black bottom.

There is a patch that makes the system recognize the remote system and provides full key codes, see below.

Making it work

Status on July 30, 2007

In order to fix the disconnects and get proper remote control support, you should apply the following patches in that order to the v4l-dvb tree:

     * MT1060_IF1_freq_set.diff - 2.3K
             * Sets the MT2060 IF1 frequency according to the calibration values stored in the EEPROM. It is supposed to enhance the signal quality
             * Olivier Danet
             * Post: http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2006-December/014926.html
     * dibcom2.diff - 1.2K
             * fix disconnects for NOVA-T-500 and NOVA-TD
             * Jose Alberto Reguero
             * Post: http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2007-July/019284.html
     * nova-td_remote.diff - 2.6K
             * Add remote keymap for the Hauppauge Nova-TD Stick
             * Janne Grunau
             * Post: http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2007-July/019349.html
     * nova-t500_remote.diff  - 760B
             * Add remote control support for the Hauppauge Nova-T 500
             * Janne Grunau
             * Post: http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2007-July/019349.html

YMMV,,, Please report on the list.

Thanks for work by Olivier Danet, Janne Grunau and Jose Alberto Reguero.

On-board amplifier

You may want/need to turn on the on-board amplifier:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Add:

options dvb-usb-dib0700 force_lna_activation=1