Any working atsc/cqam tv cards in F16?

[Mack]

Does anyone know of a pci tv card to receive atsc / clear qam cable tv that's actually working in Fedora 16?

After a lot of research, I thought I had bought an established, well supported card ( pctv hd pci card 800i = Hauppauge pci 800i = Pinnacle pctv hd pci 800i). But no.

A kernel module error prevents the dvb frontend from attaching. After an afternoon with the driver sources, it looks like time to give up and buy another card.

Free software is free like in "free pets".

Clearly I can't trust my on line research, so if anyone can suggest a card that's actually working now, that would be great. Thanks for any help!

[george_toolan]

What kind of motherboard do you have?

Since pci is obsolete now you should try to find a pci express card ;-)

[Mack]

Thanks again, george_toolan, for your interest!

It's a fairly recent ASUS board--TH67 (maybe + or B---I'd have to check). And it also has a free PEX16_2 (PCIe Gen2 x4) and PEX1_1 (PCIe Gen2 x1) slots. It's not gaming computer by any means, but its more than what's needed to watch TV (low power i3 processor + 16G ram) because I leave it on all the time and use it headless for other jobs.

I'd read that PCIe tv cards are less likely to be well supported than PCI cards. But obviously I shouldn't believe everything I read!

Any PCIe suggestions would be terrific, too.

[george_toolan]

Sounds more like a Biostar board, but this could be the source of your problem.

The Intel H67 chipset doesn't have any pci slots anymore. They are added by another pcie/pci bridge chip and some pci cards don't seem to like this patchwork.

TV cards don't really need much bandwidth. Pcie x1 will do the trick ;-)

Can you try the card in an older computer?

[Mack]

You're exactly right: It's a Biostar MB---TH67+ for the record.

I got the computer it replaced out of storage, an HP Pavilon a1350n (Athlon 64x2 4200+), and tried the pctv 800i card in it. Unfortunately, I got exactly the same result. I have an un-updated version of F16 on the old computer; "dmesg | grep "xc5000\|cx88" is identical with that on the newer computer with the Biostar MB.

All of the PCIe cards I've checked look iffy at best, for example, Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250.

A PCI card, the pchdtv hd-5500 is promising to the extent that the outfit that sells it supports Linux. What's not so good is that everything I find about it is really old. Their wiki includes a section on setup in FC2. The kernel module cx88-dvb includes support for the hd-5500...just as it supports my pctv 800i card...

Thanks again for a good suggestion that wouldn't have occurred to me.