TwinhanDTV Digital Terrestrial TV Card Ter

This is about the TwinhanDTV Ter Mini, a Twinhan Budget PCI card, capabable of recieving only-digital TV and radio (DVB-T). It's also capabable of HDTV standard 1080i, which I haven't tested as there is no HDTV transmission in UK (and whole Europe) yet. Otherwise, the card works well with Linux.

On the package it says: "TwinhanDTV Digital Terrestrial TV Card Ter" but then actually on the side it's ticked "Mini Ter (Low Profile)" (and not "Ter (Standard)"). There's also a sticker saying "Model 3020C".

Company page: [1]

It comes up as Bt878 in lspci:

 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)

Howto make it work

Driver

The BT878 chip is supported by new kernel versions -- good news! :)

This is what I've done (Debian Sarge testing, kernel version 2.6.16.9). It follows the standard installation of the bttv driver for DVB as it is included in new kernels:

In kernel configuration (make menuconfig) make sure to have:

• Under Device Drivers - Multimedia Devices - Video for Linux

 <M> BT 848
 [*] DVB for bt878

which is equivalent to these entries in the kernel .config file:

 CONFIG_VIDEO_BT848=m
 CONFIG_VIDEO_BT848_DVB=y

• Under Device Drivers - Multimedia Devices - Digital Video Broadcasting Devices

 <M> DVB for Linux
 <M> DVB Core Support

And there under DVB Core Support - Customise DVB Frontends

 <M> ... something like DVB_BT8XX

which is equivalent to these entries in the kernel .config file:

 CONFIG_DVB=y
 CONFIG_DVB_CORE=m
 CONFIG_DVB_BT8XX=y

And maybe (not sure if necessary) still there under ATSC

 <M> Video BTCX

which is equivalent to this entry in the kernel .config file:

 CONFIG_VIDEO_BTCX = m

• Under Device Drivers - Sound - ALSA - PCI devices

 <M> BT878

which is equivalent to this entry in the kernel .config file:

 CONFIG_SND=y etc. for sound in general 
 CONFIG_SND_BT87X=m

(I may have missed a couple of options. Please add them.)

That's it. Save the config file, compile your new kernel and restart. You don't need any firmware stuff. :)

Software

I have the DVB drivers loaded. Now what?

Try if it works by setting a channel frequency using dvbtune. (Debian: # apt-get install dvbtune)

How do I tune my TV-channels? Where do I get the frequencies from?

Would be nice if there was an easy way...

More Software

You have a lot of choice. Obviously, don't use analog-TV or full-featurer-cards software but use budget-DVB-software. Don't get yourself confused that bttv was analog-TV first - it's come a long way and now the form you use is DVB. So xawtv for example will not work -- you just don't have /dev/video0 (instead you have /dev/dvb/adapter0).

VDR probably is the first choice for a DVB card. Keep in mind, the TwinhanDTV Ter is is a budget card, not a Full-featured Card so you have to install the VDR Software Decoder Plugin if you wanna use VDR for watching.

Alternatively, you could use dvbstream and then watch the MPEG-2 stream (even possible on a different computer) with programs like xine, mplayer etc.

Troubleshooting

Any software I use comes up with error messages like "can't find demux".

This means that /dev/dvb/adapter0/demux is missing. Probably your card drivers are not installed properly. Then, you don't have anything in /dev/dvb/. If that's the case, check above that you have all in your kernel config (of your running kernel, of course) and that you loaded them all with modprobe.