[mythtv-users] Is pcHDTV a DVB card?

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Tue Aug 8 23:38:58 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 18:55 -0400, Carl Reynolds wrote:
> I had been ignoring the discussions about DVB because there are sooo..
> many other things to read here and because being in the U.S. I assumed
> that DVB wasn't applicable to my system.
> 
> However, I was recently reading the pcHDTV forums and they said that
> signal coming from the card is DVB. Does this mean that when I install a
> pcHDTV card I will also need to add the DVB drivers to watch TV from
> that card with MythTV?

The signal is an ATSC signal, not a DVB signal. However, in Linux
the in kernel digital television drivers are called "DVB" drivers.
This is a historical artifact, there was earlier Linux APIs called
Video4Linux and Video4Linux v2. Drivers employing these APIs are
available for the pcHDTV HD-2000 and HD-3000 cards, these are supported
by MythTV, but they are do not work with Linux 2.6.10 or later.

The DVB driver are the way to go with a HD-3000 or HD-5500 card.
The situation with the HD-2000 is a little more complicated, the
DVB drivers do not support the second input on the card, but MythTV
only supports both the analog and digital portions of the card with
the DVB drivers.

When speaking of ATSC/QAM cards like the pcHDTV cards "DVB" refers
to the Linux driver API. Recently the V4L and DVB projects have been
merged, but so long as most of the developers are in Europe the
name is not likely to change to something less confusing. In Europe,
"DVB" is not a confusing name, there all Digital Television is "DVB".
The Linux DVB API actually does nothing DVB standard specific. It
does do some MPEG-TS specific things, but both DVB and ATSC are
extensions to MPEG, so this doesn't cause any problems.

-- Daniel



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list