ISDB-T devices
- ISDB-T PCI Cards
- ISDB-T PCIe Cards
- ISDB-T USB Devices (Pensticks, Boxes, etc)
- DVB-T IEEE1394 / Firewire / iLink Boxes
- ISDB-T PCMCIA Cards (PC Card/CardBus, ExpressCard)
Support for Brazilian television
Linux now includes support for capturing Brazilian television, which uses the ISDB-T standard.
Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote this about supported device availability on 29 December 2014:
- One supported hardware that it seems it is still in sales in Brazil is this one:
- It is based on a chipset that it is not manufactured anymore (mb86a20s), so it will eventually start to be harder to find it.
- There are some devices based on Dibcom dib8096 and on Siano sms2270 that aren't deprecated, but I'm not sure what are the brand names for devices with those chipsets that are currently in the market.
- The sms2270 is, IMHO, the best chipset for ISDB-T, but the last device I got has no brand on it (it is a "generic" tuner made in China).
- The thing with those devices is that the vendors change the hardware from time to time without notice, and sometimes, without even changing their brand name.
Outdated section
Support for ISDB-T devices is currently in its infancy under Linux, having only been added to the Linux DVB S2API in September 2009. The number of drivers and supported devices will surely grow in time.
How do I make ISDB-T devices work with the current dvb-apps version?
Currently, some changes are needed within the dvb-apps in order to support the new DVBS2API parameters for ISDB-T. Until those changes are implemented there, and within userspace apps, you will need to use the DVB-T format.
In the case of ISDB-T, the current implementations (Brazil and Japan) use 6 MHz bandwidth with the same ISDB-T Frequency Table. In the future, this is likely to change.
For the device to work, the first step is to seek for the existing channels. This is done by running the 'scan' application:
scan FrequencyTable >channels.conf
Then, a DVB-T userspace application can be used to play the stream. In the case of Brazil, the application needs to support H.264 for video, HE-AAC for audio, and PMT tables at the mpeg-ts. Currently, only vlc and the newest development versions of mplayer are known to support. However, some stream types are known to not work with none of those two applications, due to some existing bugs.