[linux-dvb] Hauppauge DVB-C review

[Dennis Noordsij <dennis.noordsij@wiral.com>]

Hi,

After lurking on this list for months, checking prices in stores here, I 
finally decided to go for the hauppauge dvb-c card which has only recently 
been introduced here. Because of the Finnish cable network using both qam-64 
and qam-128, the fujitsu-siemens activy 300 does not work with all bouquets, 
which is a shame because it is half the price (!) of the Hauppauge!

So, I sold my wife's kidney, and got it. I thought I'd first try it under 
Windows just to see if all is right with the card and my cable connection, 
but what a pain that turned out to be! The Hauppauge software didn't want to 
install (don't you love an error that says "error 0x4343bf23 invalid RPC stub 
something") - much to my surprise did manage to find a "fix" from MS, and the 
Hauppauge TV app installed. Lovely new non-standard interface, spent 10 
minutes hovering the mouse pointer over everything which might be a button to 
see if the tooltips show anything useful.

I never did get it to find any channels, the channel search was very 
unintuitive and I didn't feel like wasting much time on it.

So, went to Linux, installed everything, and after a few hours (!) of 
fiddling, managed to get dvbtune to lock onto one of the bouquets and give me 
a beautiful dump of stream PID's.

The short version: card works perfectly. It locks on to qam-64 and qam-128 
bouquets without problems, tv-out (card has composite only) works great. 

Long version: Couldn't get it to tune at first, so I thought I'd try to play a 
DVD through the card's decoder. mplayer seems to prefer the old drivers (not 
NEWSTRUCT) so I installed those, they worked fine and mplayer's CPU usage 
went from 45% (software DVD playing) to 4-5%. I used the composite-in on an 
analogue tv-card to view the result :-) Switched back to NEWSTRUCT after 
that.

Finland's HTV (Helsinki/Espoo area cable network) uses qam-128 as well as 
qam-64 which is different from most other places where they just use qam-64. 
Most dvbtools seem to ignore the -qam parameter, either because they only 
consider it relevant for DVB-T, or because it hasn't been caught because 
everybody who used it so far only needs qam-64. Patched to use qam-128 
though, they work fine.

dvbtune wants the frequency in Hz, while dvbstream claims to want it in Hz but 
then multiplies it by 1000L. vdr channel.conf uses MHz resolution, but for 
the HTV network you actually want to take the advertised MHz frequency and 
subtract 125kHz for qam-64 and 250kHz for qam-128. kHz resolution was easy 
enough to patch in vdr's sources. Also, I didn't see where in the 
channels.conf to specify the qam to use, but I do remember having seen 
something about that in this list, so I did a dirty fix but would like to 
know if there is a patch or something I missed :-) 

Hardcoding dvr to one qam setting and putting all relevant channels in 
channels.conf gives a nicely working vdr! EPG data kind of sucks, not much 
info included. vdr shows whatever info there is perfectly, there just isn't 
much :-) Channel hopping works fine.

So, in short, this is a very expensive card (316 euro in Finland), but I 
figured I'd try because you get 2 weeks to return it if you're unhappy with 
it for whatever reason. It works perfectly under Linux. Funnily enough, it 
doesn't work for me under Windows and I can't be bothered to try any more :-)

If there are no cheaper cards that support your local cable network, I'd 
recommend this one. It just works :)

Cheers,
Dennis



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