Hauppauge Nova-T Stick
The Hauppauge Nova-T Stick is an USB2.0 DVB-T tuner with an additional antenna port.
Features
- Microtune MT2060 tuner
- Dibcom DVB-T demodulator
- USB 2.0 controller
- Remote control
Installation
Since kernel 2.6.19, nearly all Nova-T sticks are recognized correctly. So if you just plug in your Nova-T Stick and run dmesg, you should see something like this:
usb 2-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5 usb 2-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T Stick' in cold state, will try to load a firmware dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)
As you see, the stick has been recognized, but it is not working yet because the firmware was missing. Download the firmware file and copy it to /lib/firmware.
Depending on your box number (e.g. 293) or device no. (e.g. 70009), the kernel may require the firmware version to be dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw. So either you just rename the firmware linked above or put a link. That's up to you. Both seem to work fine.
If this is done, just plug in the USB stick again and see what happens. The output of dmesg is supposed to look like this:
usb 2-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7 usb 2-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T Stick' in cold state, will try to load a firmware dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw' dib0700: firmware started successfully. dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T Stick' in warm state. dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer. DVB: registering new adapter (Hauppauge Nova-T Stick). DVB: registering frontend 0 (DiBcom 7000PC)... MT2060: successfully identified (IF1 = 1220) dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-T Stick successfully initialized and connected.
Perfect! Our USB stick is now ready to do its service.
Configuration
User permissions
In order to have access to our USB stick as a normal user, you will have to add yourself to the video group:
# gpasswd -a USER video
Where USER is the name of the user which you want to grant access. Afterwards, either reboot or relogin.
Getting channels
Now that we have setup our USB stick and it is working fine, let us scan for channels. Therefore, I recommend the linuxtv-dvb-appsAUR package which you can find in the community repository.
Also, we need a so called initial scan file. This file is needed for scan to work properly. It provides a frequency that scan is going to use as a starting point from which it will proceed with its scan. These files are specific to your geographic location and have the form of cc-Ttttt, where cc is a two-letter country abbreviation, and Ttttt is the name of the location of the transmitter. You will find a lot of scan files in the official dvb-apps repository.
If you cannot find a suitable initial scan file, then you can build your own with w_scan_cppAUR:
$ w_scan -x > cc-Ttttt
So for example, in Leipzig, Germany, you would look for a file called de-Leipzig:
$ scan de-Leipzig > leipzig.conf
After a few seconds, the scan has finished and all found channels have been written into our leipzig.conf.
Watch TV
Now there are a lot of ways to watch TV, for example, with kaffeine, xine-ui, MPlayer, VLC media player, and so on. Also, some of these programs provide EPG, Time shafting, and things like that.
A fast way is to just open your leipzig.conf with VLC and enjoy watching!