I already wrote about plans of TechnoTrend to stop producing of its famous DVB cards which supported very well by Linux. But today I found information about buying of TechnoTrend by the Gorler Telekom. That’s really good because the Gorler Telekom is going to continue developing and producing DVB cards. So, Linux users will have a well-supported DVB cards again.
The new site of Gorler Telekom & TechnoTrend can be found here.
Reel Multimedia offers to all Linux users its videodecoder board Extension-HD. It allows to use low performance PCs to display High Definition TV in MPEG-4 with resolutions of 1280×720 (720p) and 1920×1080 (1080i). The board is equiped by two video outputs: HDMI and YUV. So, it can be connected to both modern LCD/Plasma and old TVs.
The Extension-HD is low-profile PCI card which allows to install it even in compact case. Its power consumption is about 10W. The board is supported in kernel 2.6.22 and above. VDR can work with it via plugin eHD Reelbox
The price of Extension-HD is €159.00.
After upgrading my LinuxMCE 0710 Beta 4 to final version I faced with strange thing. Sound and LiveTV didn’t work. I spent a few house to investigate that problem. And finally found that I have two sound cards and no any DVB:
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [Audiowerk2 ]: aw2 - Audiowerk2
Audiowerk2 with SAA7146 irq 16
1 [NVidia ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
HDA NVidia at 0xfe020000 irq 20
By some reason system recognized DVB card as sound.
I solved the problem with sound just defining NVidia as default card:
asoundconf set-default-card 1
But still didn’t have any luck with DVB. Thanks for folks from linux-dvb mailing list solution was found. The new Audiowerk2 driver recognized all saa7146-based cards as sound cards:
static struct pci_device_id snd_aw2_ids[] = {
{PCI_VENDOR_ID_SAA7146, PCI_DEVICE_ID_SAA7146, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID,
0, 0, 0},
{0}
};
To avoid that I just added snd_aw2 into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. Now my LinuxMCE works like a charm!
Good news for all fans of VDR and HDTV. Finally, Klaus decided to add support of HDTV into VDR. According to his comment in the VDR maillist:
Yes, I do plan to do this. Yesterday I’ve installed my DVB-S2 card in a test box, so hopefully I’ll be able to start digging into this one of these days
This good because MythTV which already supports HDTV doesn’t include a lot of VDR features.
P. S. The DVB card which is going to be used is Technotrend S2-3200 HDTV-S2.
