Recommendations for DVB-T2 USB tuner (for use with Pi 4 running TVHeadend)

My present setup has:

- PCTV 491e DVB-S2

- PCTV 292e DVB-T2

- Hauppauge WinTV Nova DVB-T (not T2)

The Hauppauge is getting very flaky: it suddenly starts throwing thousands of continuity errors, even when the signal is good and it's been working fine.

So I'm looking to replace it. I'd go for a second PCTV 292e, but Amazon seem to have stopped selling it, and I can't find it for sale anywhere else.

Can anyone recommend a device similar to the 292e which is supported by Raspian on a Pi. I've got kernel 5.4. I don't want to have to upgrade to kernel 5.10 because I found that this introduced faults in the 491e satellite decoder: I've forgotten the details now, but I remember having to regress to an older image of the system drive with kernel 5.4 (thank goodness I image the SD card every so often).

I'd go for another satellite tuner instead of terrestrial (*), but it would mean a major upgrade to my dish (to fit an LNB with more than two feeds) and then running an extra cable to the living room.

(*) Terrestrial reception is good but not flawless, because of a nearby hill. And as today's news about the fire at Bilsdale proves, transmitters (very, very occasionally) can go off air for long periods of time.

Reply to
NY
Loading thread data ...

Does it need to be USB?

formatting link
should be supported out of the box, and less of a lottery as you get with the bottom-end USB sticks.

Theo

Reply to
Theo

You could upgrade your TVs and run them all off WIFI/Ethernet from the RPi/DVB streamer, then there wouldn't be any need for TVs to have their own satellite feed, or ariel/satellite cables. The ariel cable could be replaced with Ethernet cable.

Only the rPi would need satellite feeds, and that could be hidden away.

It's what I did, used a HTPC for each TV and effectively used the TV as a dumb computer monitor. I was playing with using a RPi as the HTPC but it wasn't powerful enough.

It worked well until I decided I just didn't watch broadcast TV and no longer needed a licence or satellite.

Reply to
Pancho

Does the Pi TV hat have support for TVHeadend - does it still map to devices of the form /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0? Or does it need special PVR software to talk to it?

I'd love to know what the intermittent problem is with my Hauppauge device. Normally the two DVB-T devices report (in TVHeadend) very similar signal strengths of about -40 dBm. But sometimes the Hauppauge reports about -60 dBm (a lot weaker). And yet the two devices are fed from the same aerial amplifier. The Hauppauge has always been a bit "weird": the signal-to-noise ratio (*) is reported as 0.2 dB (signal and noise fairly similar level!!!) whereas the PCTV 292e reports a more healthy 20 dB. I've tried swapping cables in case one amplifier-to-tuner cable is dodgy, but this makes no difference.

(*) That was the case even when we lived at another house which had a much stronger signal which didn't even need an amplifier, so I think the SNR figure being reported is fictitious.

Reply to
NY

I'm running a similar setup to yours on a Pi2 with a 491e for DVB-S2 and a Hauppauge WinTV-dual HD for DVB-T2.

The WinTV-dual seems to still be available from the usual outlets. It seems to use the same chipset as the 292e and IIRC the same firmware worked. The USB interface uses 'bulk' mode which some claim reduces the load on the USB network.

My only criticism is that the tuner gets very warm, even hanging in free air supported by its cables. I have a powered USB hub with a 4A PSU so power is not a problem.

--
Dave
Reply to
Dave

TVHeadend is the recommended software:

formatting link

Given the RPi folks have a close relationship with Sony who make the silicon (use Sony camera modules, assemble boards in Sony's factory) I would expect solid engineering[1]. But I haven't used the Pi TV HAT myself.

Theo

[1] page 12:
formatting link
Reply to
Theo

NY wrote on 10-08-2021 at 23:18:

Ah-ha! NY = North Yorkshire :)

For people outside the UK, in mainland Europe specifically, I don't think the Pi TV HAT is a good solution because it doesn't decrypt and most DVB streams in Europe are encrypted. See e.g. this subthread

formatting link

Reply to
A. Dumas

That's not quite true, it varies with every country. In Germany for example nearly everything is unencrypted with the exception of some HD streams of private stations and, of course, Pay TV.

- j -

--
Mail address is valid for a limited time only. 

And now for something completely different...
Reply to
Joerg Walther

Looks good. I'd have bought a dual-tuner device when I bought the 292e if such a thing had been available.

I presume it's this one

formatting link

Let's hope the "New model, with improved TV receiver for superior over-the-air TV reception" is still Linux-compatible. I got bitten with the

491e DVB-S2. I bought two of them (thinking the house would have two satellite feeds to the living room, in addition to the one for watching TV live) and one was the old chipset which works, whereas the other is the new chipset for which a driver was not yet available. I don't know whether that's still the case: the PCTV engineer on the support thread where this was being discussed was talking about people having to rebuild their kernel to include the driver. When I investigated, this looked non-trivial and required a lot of dependent packages to be downloaded because they are not supplied with Raspbian. It's a shame that UNIX "compiles" all drivers into the kernel rather than having them separately loaded on demand, as Windows does.
Reply to
NY

I'm not familiar with the details, but do you know if decryption is something that needs to be supported by the DVB adapter? I'd have thought the adapter produces a data stream, and if (part of) the stream happens to be encrypted then you need to do a software decryption before you try and display it.

There is a question of how you get the decryption keys, and the adapter doesn't have a smartcard or other slot. But possibly you could have an external smartcard interface (USB?) and talk to it that way.

A point to mention is the Pi TV HAT is only single stream, so you can't record multiple muxes at once.

Theo

Reply to
Theo

Yep. Bought mine five months ago.

--
Dave
Reply to
Dave

Raspbian is Linux not Unix. Linux has supported loadable kernel modules for decades, and rebuilding the kernel is not necessary. I suspect this is not the area of expertise of the PCTV engineer.

---druck

Reply to
druck

Ah, thanks. I took the PCTV engineer's word as gospel, not least because the last time I worked on UNIX (on ICL servers) you definitely *did* have to rebuild the kernel, and the installation script for one of the packages I was working on copied a driver in place and then rebuilt the kernel to include it. But time has marched on, and for once product has been in a positive direction (*) - loadable kernel modules sound the dog's bollocks.

(*) I always remember my maths teacher, a card-carrying professional cynic, telling us "progress is a vector quantity - it has direction as well as size so sometimes it goes backwards".

Reply to
NY

Grrr. Fingers disobeyed brain. I meant "progress".

Reply to
NY

I think that's true, but there has to be some planning & integration between DVB adapter, smartcard reader and software. For Raspberry Pi, the development seems to have halted straight when the TV HAT was released. So, no news about American models, DVB-C support or smartcard integration.

In that announcement post I linked, a RPi engineer said: "Yes. Single tuner. But viewing/recording multiple channels from the same mux is supported."

Reply to
A. Dumas

But if I were to buy DVB-T/2 receiver I would want to watch HD channels, not just SD. By "private" I think you mean anything that's not ARD/ZDF? Maybe WDR/NDR etc are unencrypted HD, too?

Reply to
A. Dumas

They all are unencryped. By private I mean Sat1, RTL, Pro7 etc. Their SD programs are unencrypted, the HD ones are and you have to pay to be able to watch these.

- j -

--
Mail address is valid for a limited time only. 

And now for something completely different...
Reply to
Joerg Walther

Support for multiple channels *on the same mux* is not guaranteed. I used to use Windows Media Centre to record TV programmes in the early days, and this could only record one channel per tuner: it couldn't record two channels from the same mux even though this should have been technically possible.

Other PVR programs I've used - NextPVR and TVHeadend - have no problem recording multiple programmes from one mux via one tuner, so it was just WMC that was antediluvian.

Do DVB-T/S tuners always send the full mux to the PVR software, and let that software select the PIDs that it wants to record/view. Or does the protocol allow the tuner to be given the PIDs that are required, so only they (and no others) are sent over USB? In other words, getting the tuner rather than the software to do the filtering, to reduce USB bandwidth.

On my RPi setup I've done test recordings where I record all of a multiplex (all 24 or 40 Mbps of it), for three different muxes (using one DVB-S and two DVB-T tuners). That seems to be pretty flawless. Likewise I've tried setting to record multiple channels from the same mux simultaneously. That again works fine.

Reply to
NY

That is what I meant, yes. Commercial station might be a better description than private, despite the English term for the non-commercial stations being "public broadcaster".

I'm in NL where we only get ARD/ZDF/WDR so I don't know these other ones except by name. Just like their Dutch counterparts, they're probably garbage but popular. So a TV adapter that can't do encrypted HD channels might be of limited use to most Germans, just like I said originally.

Reply to
A. Dumas

Well that was easy to set up! Almost *too* easy - what might I have forgotten?

On my Windows PC, using the :9981 web site

- plug in the new device:

- two new tuners appear in Config | DVB Inputs | TV Adapters

- enable each one and set it to use the same Network as for the existing PCTV 292e

- set the priorities so they are in the order (most to least preferable) PCTV 491e sat, new Hauppauge #1 terr, new Hauppauge #2 terr, PCTV 292e terr (I could set all the terrestrials to the same priority; I only used different value to prove a point)

- went into Config | DVB Inputs | Services and clicked in turn on three different services (channels) for the terrestrial network, to view them in VLC

- Status showed that tuners were allocated in the order that I was expecting based on priorities

With three instances of VLC on Windows playing three channels, streaming over the network, the PC's CPU fan ramps up a gear, but CPU usage on the Pi barely changes - 2% with nothing playing to 3-4% with three channels. That was for 3 SD channels. I'll have to repeat it with three HD channels...

For some reason I originally set up two separate networks for the PCTV 292e and the old Hauppauge, even though they were the same frequencies and muxes - probably ignorance and piss-poor setup instructions. TVHeadend's manual is somewhat lacking and describes *what* controls do but not *why* you would use one thing rather than the other. They need a decent many-to-one and one-to-many diagram to show multiple tuners mapped to one service and then several of those services mapped to one channel. I can probably delete the second network.

Luckily my local transmitter isn't Bilsdale so I'm not affected by the total loss of all muxes following the fire. Sad to see it on the local news with paint blistering and to imagine equipment and cabling which will all need to be ripped out and replaced. It's a majestic sight from the Helmsley to Chop Gate road, standing proud on the hillside - only passed that way a couple of weeks ago. I can vaguely remember when I was little being taken to see Emley Moor mast which had collapsed in 1969 when ice broke the guy ropes. I don't remember the impact as regards loss of channels, but then we had a 405-line TV in those days so BBC 1 at least would have been from Moorside Edge, but ITV would have been down until they got a temporary transmitter going. And of course no 625-line BBC1 or ITV, and no BBC 2 at all (it was never on 405 line).

Reply to
NY

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.