TBS6285

TBS6285 PCI-E low profile DVB-T2 Quad TV Tuner Card, as the name suggests, is a DVB-T2 PCIe Card from TBS Technologies. It is an update to the TBS6284 card for DVB T2 reception countries, such as UK, Sweden. It supports watching or recording four different channels .This DVB T2 PC TV card is ready with windows BDA driver and Linux driver. It’s ideal for watching UK Freeview SD and HD channels on PC.

The connectors are satellite 'F' type female screw connectors and provides RF in and out signals for other TV tuners.

This card behaves the same as the TBS6284 card, so use the same procedure to install.

Installation Issues

When installed into Myth TV 0.27, the driver install process caused issues on a mythbuntu build.

I followed this process

  1. Update the install with update/upgrade
  2. Install TBS drivers as per TBS6284 instructions
  3. nothing was added to the /var/log/syslog or dmesg output
  4. reboot the system
  5. I found "disagrees about version of symbol dvb_frontend_detach" messages in the dmesg output, so follow instructions for this at the TBS forum [1]
     a. cd to the "tbs-linux-drivers" subdirectory
     b. move or delete the contents of the kernel library drivers/media subdirectory using 
        "sudo mv /lib/modules/$(uname-r)/kernel/drivers/media ~/.media.bak" or 
        "rm -Rf /lib/modules/3.8.0-29-generic/kernel/drivers/media" (this is for Ubuntu based systems)
     c. reinstall drivers using "sudo make install"
     d. reboot the system

This gives working card drivers loaded and seen during the boot sequence.

When the kernel is updated (due to security updates), then I found the TBS help wiki's fedora installation instructions useful. These are:

  1. cd to the "tbs-linux-drivers" subdirectory
  2. move or delete the contents of the kernel library drivers/media subdirectory using 
     "sudo mv /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/media ~/.media.bak" or 
     "rm -Rf /lib/modules/3.8.0-29-generic/kernel/drivers/media" (this is for Ubuntu based systems)
  3. Reconfigure the drivers. For this I found the following steps which worked for me.
     a. clean out the code and reset the installation kernel data using the "sudo make distclean" command
     b. rerun the installation settings script with the "sudo ./v4l/tbs-x86_64.sh " command
     c. configure the driver settings (this is a guess) using the "sudo make release" command
     d. configure the driver settings (this is a guess) using the "sudo make menuconfig" command. 
        I enabled the "Enable drivers not supported by this kernel" which on hindsight should be left unchecked. 
        The fedora instructions said to just exit this. 
  4. rebuild the driver using the "sudo make" command (this will take a while)
  5. reinstall drivers using the "sudo make install" command
  6. load newly installed driver using the "sudo modprobe -v tbs62x0fe" command
  7. reboot the system

The installation now uses and installs to the latest kernel's "/lib/modules/" directory.

IRQ Issues

After an extended period the combined TBS driver may crash with messages (check using dmesg) such as:

 irq 16: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
 ...
 Disabling IRQ #16

This will render the device inoperable until rebooting (including IR receiver), meaning it won't be able to record anything.

This can be resolved by configuring the driver to use MSI instead of IRQ:

 sudo sh -c 'echo options saa716x_tbs_dvb int_type=1 > /etc/modprobe.d/tbs.conf'

See this TBS forum thread for more details.