Testing Your DVB Card
Introduction
In this section we will bypass MythTV and test the card directly. This is useful for debugging problems with tuning to see if it's a problem with Myth or with the card itself.
Install the Test Software
Please check that you have the universe repositories selected:
We're now going to test the card by viewing some output. For this, we'll need some DVB utilities and a movie player. As everything is so easy with Ubuntu, why not try out both xine and mplayer...?
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install dvb-utils dvbstream sudo apt-get install xine-ui mplayer
Watch Some TV
Firstly, make sure you have your aerial plugged into your tuner card. Now we can search for channels in your area using the scan utility. The scan program doesn't do frequency scans, so it needs initial tuning data for at least one transponder/channel in your area. For my Winter Hill transmitter, I use the following (this is done as the root user using sudo -s):
sudo -s -H mkdir /root/.tzap scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-t/uk-WinterHill > /root/.tzap/channels.conf
Note: The scan will fail if you have an old Nova-T with a TDA1004x chipset and have not loaded any firmware. See this howto before going any further.
Once you have the channel data, you can use tzap to tune into one of the frequencies:
sudo -s -H tzap -r "BBC ONE"
It's best to leave this going while we use dvbstream and xine or mplayer to view an actual mpeg stream:
dvbstream -o -ps 600 601 -qam 16 -cr 3_4 | mplayer - dvbstream -o -ps 600 601 -qam 16 -cr 3_4 | gxine stdin://mpeg2
