Mygica T1800B

A DVB-T PCI card produced and sold by Mygica.

It is supported under Linux 3.0 with an out of tree driver. I have successfully used it with mplayer v1.0rc3 and MythTV v0.23 to watch DVB free to air TV.

Overview/Features

This PCI card has two onboard USB DVB-T tuners connected by a VIA hub. Both of these work fine. It also has a remote control, which I have not tested, and DAB+ which I don't know how to test.

Identification

The chipset is RTL2832U, which is written in all the files on the Windows driver CD that is bundled with it.

The USB device ID reported by lsusb is 1f4d:a803.

I purchased the Mygica T1800B from Capitol Computers for 70 AUD. It seems to be quite widely available around Australia.

Making it Work

Note that lines beginning with # must be run as root, either by using sudo or logging in as root. Lines beginning $ can be run as a normal user.

Kernel

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04, and this card is not supported out of the box. There are out of tree drivers available at: https://github.com/ambrosa/DVB-Realtek-RTL2832U-2.2.2-10tuner-mod_kernel-3.0.0

First you must upgrade to the Linux 3.0 kernel and install some other tools:

# aptitude install linux-image-generic-lts-backport-oneiric linux-headers-generic-lts-backport-oneiric
# aptitude install build-essential dkms git-core

Out of Tree Driver

Now we'll check out the source code for the driver and build it with DKMS. Using DKMS means that whenever a kernel security update is delivered by Ubuntu you'll automatically get the module rebuilt and installed for the new kernel. This is handy. Note: If installing on a v3.2 kernel, you must edit the INCLUDE_EXTRA_DVB line in the Makefile to specify the correct version.

$ git clone https://github.com/ambrosa/DVB-Realtek-RTL2832U-2.2.2-10tuner-mod_kernel-3.0.0.git
$ cd DVB-Realtek-RTL2832U-2.2.2-10tuner-mod_kernel-3.0.0.git/RTL2832-2.2.2_kernel-3.0.0/
$ cat > dkms.conf <<EOT
PACKAGE_NAME=dvb-rtl2832u
PACKAGE_VERSION=2.2.2
CLEAN="make clean"
AUTOINSTALL=yes
MAKE[0]="make KDIR=\${kernel_source_dir}"
BUILT_MODULE_NAME[0]=dvb-usb-rtl2832u
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]=/extra
EOT
# ln -s "$PWD" /usr/src/dvb-rtl2832u-2.2.2
# dkms add -m dvb-rtl2832u -v 2.2.2
# dkms build -m dvb-rtl2832u -v 2.2.2
# dkms install -m dvb-rtl2832u -v 2.2.2

Final Steps

You can use modprobe dvb-usb-rtl2832u to load the driver. At this point you should have /dev/dvb/ devices that you can set up and use. If you add the module name to /etc/modules it will be automatically loaded whenever you boot.