Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T-500

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

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. If you apply all these patches 1 2 3 then you won't get a kernel oops - instead, your LinuxDVB 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. There is currently (May 2007) no known fix for the underlying USB disconnect problem.

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.

I've got 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.