Pinnacle PCTV 300i

The Pinnacle PCTV 300i is a DVB-T-ready analogue/digital internal TV tuner card, with optional remote control.

http://www.bttv-gallery.de/img08177fz.jpg_pinnacle_300i_11bd_002d_a.jpg

Card features

• PCI Rev. 2.3 interface
• Video/audio decoder: Philips SAA7134 (datasheet)
• Analog demodulator: TDA 9887 (datasheet)
• TV tuner: Microtune MT2050 (datasheet)
• DVB-T demodulator: Zarlink MT352, (datasheet)

Supported features

• Analog TV
• Digital (DVB-T) TV
• S-Video Input
• VBI (Teletext)
• Digital audio input (via alsa or oss module)

Unupported features

• Remote: has been disabled on Feb 2006 due to i2c hangs (check v4l-dvb Changelog for news)

Card connectors

• TV signal: IEC connector
• Video Inputs: S-Video input (Mini-DIN), Composite video input (chinch)
• IR-Remote input: 2.5 mm stereo socket
• Audio output: four-pin plug-in connector, 2.8 mm grid (internal)

lspci -v

0000:04:08.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7134 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
     Subsystem: Pinnacle Systems Inc. Pinnacle PCTV 300i DVB-T + PAL
     Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 58
     Memory at faaffc00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]
     Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1

Kernel output

saa7130/34: v4l2 driver version 0.2.14 loaded
saa7134[0]: found at 0000:00:0a.0, rev: 1, irq: 16, 32, mmio: 0xe2008000
saa7134[0]: subsystem: 11bd:002d, board: Pinnacle 300i DVB-T + PAL [card=50,autodetected]
saa7134[0]: board init: gpio is c806000
tda9887 0-0043: chip found @ 0x86 (saa7134[0])
tuner 0-0060: Chip ID is not zero. It is not a TEA5767
tuner 0-0060: chip found @ 0xc0 (saa7134[0])
tuner 0-0060: v4l2_int ioctl TUNER_SET_TYPE_ADDR, (0x4004645a)
tuner 0-0060: Calling set_type_addr for type=33, mode=0x04
tuner 0-0060: tuner 0x60: called during i2c_client by adapter's attach_inform
tuner 0-0060: v4l2_int ioctl TDA9887_SET_CONFIG, (0x4004645c)
tuner 0-0060: pinnacle pal
tuner 0-0060: MT20xx hexdump: 42 2c 29 e7 66 63 11 88 29 07 85 99 e3 b7 f0 13  24 3c bf 42 2c
tuner 0-0060: microtune: companycode=3cbf part=42 rev=2c
tuner 0-0060: mt2050: sro is b7
tuner 0-0060: microtune MT2050 found, OK
tuner 0-0060: saa7134[0] tuner I2C addr 0xc0 with 33 used for 0x0e
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 00: bd 11 2d 00 f8 f8 1c 00 43 a9 1c 55 d2 b2 92
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 10: 00 f0 04 04 ff 20 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 20: 01 40 01 02 03 ff 03 01 08 00 25 ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 30: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 40: ff 16 00 c0 86 3c 01 01 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 50: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 60: 0c 22 17 44 03 0d 57 7c ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 70: 00 30 8d 17 ee cd ff ff 34 ff ff ff ff ff ff

Module Options

Normally the card needs no options and is recognized as card=50 with tuner=33. It was said, that you have to load the tda9887 module before the tuner (mt2050), to get the analogue part going.

Known Problems

Various people reported their Pinnacle 300i is not working on recent (2.6.15-15) kernels (90% of the time the mt2050 is not detected by microtune_init, and scanning fails even when it is detected).

As it was reported, the best working setup ever was with kernel 2.6.12.5 and the video4linux-archive as of 27062005 from bytesex.org.

At least one user has had good results using a 2.6.15 kernel: The missing mt2050 problem was solved by ensuring that tda9887 was loaded before tuner. The tuning failure problem should have been fixed in Feb 2006. As an alternative, a quick but ugly patch was to modify a line in mt20xx.c, from "if (V4L2_TUNER_DIGITAL_TV == t->mode) {" to "if (1) {". However, this edit breaks analogue tuning for mt20xx tuners. With these fix, dvb-t worked very well in Xine/Kaffeine but mplayer tended to lock up quite frequently (it looked like it was failing to recover from glitches in reception (does mplayer do this with other cards too?))

Note also that:

• As of Jun 2006, tda9887 module has been merged into "tuner" module and doesn't exist anymore on its own. You can load "tuner" module with the same options of "tda9887".
• Around Jan 2006, it was noticed that tda9887 needed port2 set to 1 to work; a patch was made for it. You could also try loading tda9887 module with "port2=1" option.
• If you still experience problems, this could be due to an old V4L driver in your kernel. You don't need to get sorurces and compile a new kernel to update V4L; just get Mercurial (similar to CVS), use it to download latest V4L-DVB version, and compile it. You can then install the new V4L modules on top of your existing kernel (detailed instructions here on linuxtv).

Links

• Gentoo wiki on saa7134 - with extra info about 300i's tuning problems (at the end)
• PCTV 300i Product homepage - general info from Pinnacle about the product