Getting the DTT Trials on your Myth Box

adrian.s

Thought I'd post a few pointers if any of you in the Greater Dublin area running myth boxes fancied giving this a shot! I have it up and running now and amazed at the quality (particularly over my NTL Analogue feed!).

Assuming you're reasonably savvy on Linux since you've probably got a working myth box! If not, swing over to mythtv.org for help in getting started. If there's something you're unclear off here, mail and I'll try to get back to quickly.

To get started, you'll a need a DVB-T card configured and up and running. There's a bunch of them out there, I personally have a Hauppage 1100 hybrid card in and it's wokring fine. I use Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty with all updates). The only problem is that Feisty wont by default load the DVB portion of the Kernel driver, so you'll need to add saa7134-dvb (if your device is based on the philips chip) to /etc/modules or cxx88-dvb (if based on a conexant chip).

Once you've got a /dev/dvb/adaptor0 directory structure you're in business.


I'm attaching a channels.conf file to make setting up your channels a whole lot easier. This file only contains access to the free to view channels available on the DTT transmission, i.e. RTE 1, RTE 2, TG4 and TV 3 plus a bunch of radio stations which you can then listen to your box as well. I haven't tried decoding the HD channel at all since my hardware is not up to it.

Use tzap (available in dvb-utils AFAIK) and make sure you're getting a lock on the signal. For example:

tzap -c channels.conf -r "RTE 1"

Look for a FE_HAS_LOCK and good high SNR and Signal quality (look for this on the mythtv wiki for more info). If you can't get a signal, no point in going any further. I'm based in North Dublin and had to put an aerial in the loft to get reliable signal lock.

Once you've got this sorted, you'll need to add a new tuner to your myth box, so pop into mythtv-setup when you've shut down the backend. In setup choose Add New Capture Card, and select the type to "DVB DTV capture card ". For the video source, I created a new source called DTT which only picks up the 4 DTT channels from the radio times.

Next, you need to set up the Input Connections. Here's where you'll need your channels.conf (I found scanning for the channels in Myth a pain). Deselect the "only non-encrypted channels" checkbox if present. There seems to be a bug in myth here as it wont find any channel if that is selected. You should now see myth getting a lock on your channels.

And that should be pretty much it, assign some numbers to the tv channels for easy navigation from the remote.

Let me know how you get on, I know things are a little bit short here, but as I mentioned earlier, if you've gotten to the stage of having a myth box up and running, you should well able to dig up the info. It's the channels.conf file that you'll really be needing.

Regards,
Adrian.