pcHDTV :: View topic - My Experiences with the HD-3000

kabz

Cool huh ?

Card Installation

Installing the card was easy. I didn't have any problems with unexplained crashes or any conflicts with anything else.

Drivers

This was initially pretty hard. I started with Gentoo and the gentoo-dev-sources, but I basically didn't manage to get the drivers working with xine, xawtv, mplayer or anything else.

I did eventually manage to get the v4l drivers to build on a bleeding edge 2.6.11 kernel, using ~x86 on Gentoo, but nothing much else would build. there still seem to be some problems with xine etc.

At this point I backtracked, reinstalled the 2004.3 Gentoo universal. I used the development-sources kernel which was vanilla 2.6.7 I *think*, possibly 2.6.9, I guess I can come back and edit this.

At this point, I was able to build both the tools and the drivers and the drivers appeared to successfully load, but dtvsignal and dtvscan did nothing except print a static 0 signal, and a list of channels, respectively.

This seems to be pretty common on the boards. People get the driver built and loaded, but it doesn't really do anything useful. If you are running udev or devfs (most people ?) you can manually delete the video0, video32, dtv, dtv0, dtv1, dtv2 device nodes from /dev and they should come right back when you reboot. I believe devfs or udev creates these in response to the modules when they are successfully loaded.

Once I had the drivers loaded, I looked for problems with dtvscan/dtvsignal on the forum. One was about videodev not loading. I ended up recompiling the kernel, and adding 'alias pc-major-81 videodev' to my /etc/modules.conf. This basically allowed the dtvscan and dtvsignal utilities to start working.

My first HDTV content was got from :

getatsc /dev/dtv 19 > test_19.ts

I then copied the file across to my Windows XP box and played the ts (transport stream) file using mplayer. It worked !!!

A day of compiling :

emerge xorg-x11 gnome

and I have a desktop on this machine again. Ready to try displaying some HDTV !!

If you get some signal, then you can do the following :

dtvsignal /dev/dtv 27
^C
mplayer -vo x11 /dev/dtv

and you should get HDTV complete with sound.

Using Mplayer -tsprog to select the sub-stream to view

I just found the option in mplayer that lets you select the stream to watch ... do :

mplayer -vo x11 /dev/dtv -tsprog <x>

where x is the sub-stream you want to view. Some of the channels here in Houston seem to carry multiple programs on one 'channel'. Fox is the notable exception, but it seems to have the best quality stream, from what I have seen so far.

Local HD Signal

I live in West Houston, about 30 miles NNW of the antenna farm at Arcola. I live in a 2nd floor apartment so I wasn't really that hopeful about getting a lot of signal.

In fact I seem to get 80% or better on about 7 channels. I'm using the $50 Terk indoor HDTV antennae from Radio Shack, though I know Fry's sell them also. Luckily antennaeweb gives me a single 162o angle and this checks out with my experience with dtvsignal. The HDTV signal seems very very directional. Much more so than the analog signal. Tested on my regular 27" TV, this antennae brings in all the channels that my unamplified rabbit ears do, but with significantly better quality.

Picture Quality / Viewing Experience

I watched the entire episode of 24 on Fox 26 (KRIV-Houston) in glorious HDTV and it was absolutely fantastic. Well well well worth all the pain. It just a completely different experience watching regular TV at DVD quality. I think I am now completely hooked.

Even regular TV that doesn't fill the whole 16:9 looks soooo much better.

Mplayer does occasionally seem to drop the soundtrack when showing SD like in commercials. I am not sure why this is. It also did this when watching the news (as I write this).

My System

My system is an AMD Athlon64 3000+ with 512 Megs, 36 Gig sata and a knockoff (Kaiser Wink

) Nvidia 5200 video card. Cost excluding case was about $600 (Athlon + mobo for $230 in Fry's)

As a sidenote, I will be building the v4l dvb drivers and using those. I was kinda concerned about the fact that maybe I wouldn't be able to watch analog TV using the card, but tvtime works, and while it works ok, the picture quality is just plain old NTSC on a computer which looks terrible.

Glover · Guest

Excellent post. Thanks. I will use this as a troubleshooting reference when i receive my card.

Scott Larson