LifeView FlyDVB-T Duo on Linux

This card is supported on Linux. But as I've found somewhat non-trivial to get to run the TV watching software, I summarize my experience here.

Required kernel modules

I run the card on Linux 2.6.17. I've loaded the following kernel modules to make the card run:

saa7134

Loaded automatically on my system, necessary to make the card run at all.

saa7134-dvb

Necessary to make DVB-T work.

saa7134-alsa

Probably necessary to get sound from the card.

DVB-T

The very first thing you should do is finding whether DVB-T broadcasting is available at all. First you must figure out technical parameters of the DVB-T broadcasting in your area, especially its frequency. Then you can use some tuning application to tune your card, e.g.:

• The dvbtune application can tune your card directly as instructed on the command line. It can also report signal quality using the -m switch. For instance, I can tune the card in our area by using dvbtune -f 626000000 -gi 8 -tm 8 -m.
• Another useful package is dvb-tools. It can scan the given frequencies for available programs. It also contains the broadcasting parameters for several areas.

You can watch DVB-T broadcasting with vlc using the following command line:

vlc dvb: --dvb-frequency=FREQUENCY-IN-HERZ 

You can change programs in the Navigation menu.

Another application that works is gxine, but it's more complicated. You must install the dvb-tools package and make it find the available programs as is described in its documentation. The resulting channels.conf file should be put to the ~/.xine/ directory. Then you can start gxine and watch the broadcasting by selecting the File/DVB menu item. You can change programs in the playlist.

Analog TV

I can watch it with tvtime. I've just let tvtime to find available channels and adjusted some settings and it worked (with the exception of sound output, see below).

xawtv worked too but it was less comfortable. zapping didn't work at all.

A special trick is needed to get sound from the analog broadcasting. For some strange reasons the TV apps can't play it. It is necessary to play it on background with another application. Here is the common way to do it:

 sox -r 32000 -w -t ossdsp /dev/dsp1 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp 

providing your sound card output is accessible as /dev/dsp and your TV card sound device is /dev/dsp1.

This way the sound is slightly out of sync with video. What is worse, the difference between sound and video increases during time and I have to restart the sound playing process from time to time for this reason. I don't know how to fix this problem, any advice is welcome.

FM radio

To my knowledge FM radio reception is not supported on Linux with this card.

Remote control

Since Linux 2.6.17 it should work and it actually works well for me with the dev/input lirc driver.

Milan Zamazal <pdm@zamazal.org>
Last modified: 2006-07-27 16:37 UTC.