Need help getting DVB-T2 to work in UK (or Ireland)

[jaywalker]

I have been trying for only a couple of weeks but I don't think I am going to get anywhere with this without help.

I bought a PCTV 292E from Maplin as that seemed to be the best supported readily available hardware solution. Ooops. It wasn't a 292E but a newer type with slightly different internals which will not see support in Mageia until MGA5 hits the streets.

I am prepared to abandon it and go shopping again if anyone out there can suggest a combination of hardware/Mageia version which is known to work with BBC, ITV (and possible RTE) HD or mp4 streams.

I set out on this quest to regain coverage of Film 4+1 which switched transmission modes a month or three ago and now requires a DVB-T2 receiver. If push comes to shove I can survive without it by adding a third DVB-T tuner to my MythTV backend (running on MGA4 and unlikely to be moving to MGA5 in the forseeable future), but it would be nice to see if I could crack the technical challenge of getting MGA5 on a VM on the Myth server to act as a slave backend and provide the missing HD stuff.

Any ideas? IS HD on Linux in the UK a non-starter?

Richard

[morgano]

What is the problem? Missing firmware?
Maybe you can find it, like i did for my stick? viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4353
You said it is supported for mga5, maybe you can grab that firmware from there, or what it need?

BTW, any specific reason not to move system to mga5?
I did an online upgrade of my workstation without any issue
(switch repos, then first use --test parameter on urpmi so everything get downloaded, and if it reports OK, then do a real upgrade wihtout --test)
I run every system - my fileserver (nfs, owncloud, urpmi-proxy), workstation (work), laptop, wifes workstation, and childrens computers - on mga5 since end of summer
I usually switch at least one production machine to cauldron at alpha 2 so i can help find problems plus of course test that exactly what I need will be working.
Maybe i am just lucky.

[jaywalker]

Part of my problem is that I don't know what the problem is. There are too many "unknowns" for me to get my head around, and that is after eliminating a fairly substantial number of them. That is why I have decided to try to work backwards; first find out what others have been able to achieve in reaching the same goal (BBC, ITV, RTE DVB-T2 (mostly HD) reception using a Mageia platform), and then determine how much hardware/software I must change to get the same result.

I have no "objection" to moving to MGA5, it's just that by the time I am ready for it, it will probably be EOL. I still have two machines on MGA2, three on MGA3 and only one on MGA4. My MGA5 Cauldron is a VM on this MGA3 machine but it is getting little attention as my struggles with X2Go with Pulse and my MythTV configuration marathon are taking most of my time away from actually getting anything productive done. I don't seem to be able to keep whole problems in my head as well as I used to and I waste a lot of time re-learning stuff I thought I already knew; all part of the fun of getting older, I suppose.

As to the firmware point you made, there seems to be a bit of confusion "out there" about versions and checksums and file names but I am pretty sure I got the right collection of bytes from the CD driver files and the module appears to load and possibily even initialise the receiver correctly. That's where things start to go wrong. Multiple attempts to w_scan have produced all sorts of results from "none" to a few identified stations, but none of them is HD. I cannot say why this should be as in my current location I can count the rivets on the transmitter tower from the street outside and in the other main location the receiver is hanging off the end of a rooftop 13 element yagi pointing down the throat of a transmitter 12 miles away with a distribution amp providing pristine signals to four other receivers in three rooms. HD reception is perfect there, just not on my MGA5 VM with the PCTV292E!

So, in a perfect world somebody would tell me I need a particular receiver device with driver support from MGA3 onwards and it will be known to produce wonderful DVB-T2 results from a selection of BBC and other providers. Or even that I am wasting my time in a VM, that it only works on bare metal.. or something else which might help me take a step further.

R

[morgano]

So you do get some life signs of the stick
It may not be software problem: The signal may be too strong too! Meaning lot of distorsions and reflections that make the reciever fail.
I actually switched from a nice active antenna to a "piece of wire" type and got better results. (but my 20 year old bulky TV set i repaired three times works OK on the amplifier)
Also try to move and rotate it.
Being close to a transmitter is not always a good thing.
I was too close for radiolinked internet as my ISP antenna at the top of hill/mountain nearby is optimised for long range so i am below the beam...

I too is reluctant to upgrade sometimes thinking i may have forgotten how i got odd things working. Had my fileserver on mga1 for years.
Now i keep logs of "everything" i do, then follow and edit them each upgrade/reinstall. Of course there are new things happening anyway...

Could it be that running in VM disturbs timing, i.e buffers overrun in the stick or communication with it fails occasionally...?
Maybe install mga5 to a USB stick (I actually have a such stick, works pretty good but take care when it asks where and how to put the bootloader - i did not and it messed up my hard disk boot loader...)

[unklar]

The aunt Google says,

Linux support for the PCTV 292e is in kernel 3.16.
Thus, install Cauldron.

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/P ... %28292e%29
http://blog.palosaari.fi/2014/04/naked- ... -292e.html

[jaywalker]

So you do get some life signs of the stick
It may not be software problem: The signal may be too strong too! Meaning lot of distorsions and reflections that make the reciever fail.
I actually switched from a nice active antenna to a "piece of wire" type and got better results. (but my 20 year old bulky TV set i repaired three times works OK on the amplifier)
Also try to move and rotate it.
Being close to a transmitter is not always a good thing.

Agreed. I used an adjustable attenuator on my "workshop" feed for a while when I was experimenting with a couple of different makes of USB DVB-T sticks a few years ago. I suspected that they might be optimised (ie overly sensitive) for "mobile" use and that the healthy feed for the household telly's might be overloading them. I'm inclined to think that the signal strength available is suitable for a wide range of receivers, but I can easily try it with the attenuator at the weekend.

The driver does not yet support all the capabilities of the stick and in particular there is not yet any signal strength or other quality parameter reporting, but that may come in time - just another good reason to try out the system with better supported hardware - if there is any I can get my hands on.

I was too close for radiolinked internet as my ISP antenna at the top of hill/mountain nearby is optimised for long range so i am below the beam...

I suppose 13 elements is a bit of overkill and probably more directionally sensitive than the 12 miles to the transmitter might normally require, but it is many decades old and has probably lost a lot of its precision through many storms. I installed it with a mast-head amp (long since defunct) back in the days when the only colour TV transmitter was 90 miles away and it has been in service (with some loving care and re-installation) ever since.

I too is reluctant to upgrade sometimes thinking i may have forgotten how i got odd things working. Had my fileserver on mga1 for years.
Now i keep logs of "everything" i do, then follow and edit them each upgrade/reinstall. Of course there are new things happening anyway...

You sound like me, except I only ever promised myself I would write everything down. Somehow I always end up thinking "I cannot possibly forget how I did that!". I spend months tweaking for low latency sound for live recording and building programs not yet (or no longer) packaged for Mageia for myself and members of the family. My brother is still running a custom-built MGA2 because I've been too busy to figure out how much work would be involved in upgrading to MGA3 and then MGA4 came out and most of the custom stuff is now packaged but here comes MGA5 and it looks like I will have to re-engineer it without the benefit of the RT kernel... don't let me ramble on about that.

Could it be that running in VM disturbs timing, i.e buffers overrun in the stick or communication with it fails occasionally...?
Maybe install mga5 to a USB stick (I actually have a such stick, works pretty good but take care when it asks where and how to put the bootloader - i did not and it messed up my hard disk boot loader...)

Before I discovered VirtualBox I used external USB drives for various Cauldrons - I've run out of spares! Each one graduated to a working boot drive. But it is a good idea and it would rule out one possible point of failure I had considered.

Linux support for the PCTV 292e is in kernel 3.16.
Thus, install Cauldron.

That is the main reason I am looking for suggestions of other hardware which is already known to work well in the UK. I don't really mind exploring the bleeding edge with new hardware, immature drivers, experimental distros and the like, but time has made me more appreciative of things which have worked before for others and can be expected to work for me too, without all the bug-hunting and google-dredging. With a known working system it is much easier to detect anomalous behaviour and adjust expectations accordingly.

Nevertheless, I will give it a whirl on Cauldron and bare metal at the weekend as running it on Cauldron in a VM is a distinctly unrewarding experience.

Thanks for the interest.

R