[mythtv-users] TBS 6980/6981 vs TeVii S480

[Lawrence Rust]

On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 23:12 +0000, Rajil Saraswat wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am on a lookout for a PCIex card with dual tuners. I have seen some
> posts about TB6980/6981 in linux but there is not much information
> about TeVii S480. Has anybody tried the later with mythtv? Both seem
> to be similarly priced.
> 
> I want to ideally go with a card which has a driver in the kernel
> (futureproof). Also, the card needs to support S3, as my combined
> BE/FE is mostly going to be in that state. Any recommendations?

Driver support of S3, although highly desirable, isn't essential for
suspend or hibernate.

I have a TBS 6981 which doesn't intrinsically support S3 but can be made
to work with suspend or hibernate; just install pm-utils and list the
driver in /etc/pm/config.d/unload_module.  Then add a
custom /etc/pm/sleep.d/mythtv script to ensure that the BE is stopped
prior to suspend/hibernate and restarted on resume.  The last step is
necessary otherwise the open dvb devices prevent the driver from being
unloaded and reinitialised on resume.

Although the 6981 doesn't have an 'in-tree' driver, TBS do a pretty good
job of keeping the driver up to date with the latest kernels.  If you
want to be 'bleeding edge' then building a custom kernel e.g 3.3-rc3
using TBS's binary frontend isn't too difficult.  I take the frontend
object module from their driver archive, generate a diff of their
customised kernel sources and apply that to the kernel source and build
as normal.

Overall my experience of the TBS 6981 has been very positive.  The
hardware is rock solid and the driver pretty solid too.  It has good FE
sensitivity, tunes quickly and is relatively good power wise.  Only
drawback is that it appears to be a snob with LNBs - doesn't like cheap
ones.

-- 
Lawrence