Dell XPS 14 - Using TV Tuner in Linux for MythTV

I recently bought a Dell XPS 14 with the nVidia GT425M. This has a TV Tuner on it. I was thinking about giving MythTV a try under Ubuntu 10.10 and I went as far as to install the MythTV backend. In trying to set it up, I discovered that the system doesn't even recognize that there's a TV tuner card at all on the notebook.

Would anyone have an idea how to get it recognized or am I just out of luck? I'm guessing I need some kind of firmware for it but I don't know where to start looking for that.

Thanks a lot!

 

Do a lspci and post the pci ID and name of the card. That'd be a starting point, to know which card you actually have.

Compatibility info:
Analog Framebuffer Cards - MythTV
Digital Tuner Cards - MythTV
Hardware Device Information - LinuxTVWiki

 

After a lspci, the card shows up as
Multimedai Controller: Philips Semiconductors Device 7231 (rev aa)

I did some googling to find out this points to something by AVerMedia. I rebooted into Windows and found the model in the Device Manager as:

AVerMedia H339 Hybrid Analog/ATSC Linux

AVerMedia has a few cards with Linux drivers, but I can't even find this specific model on their site. Can I use software for one of the other cards and hope it will work? If so, how could I choose which card's software would be the most likely software to work?

 

Brent

What do you get if you do a

dmesg | grep dvb

Thanks

 

The avermedia stuff supported is listed here: AVerMedia - LinuxTVWiki

I'm not a guru with this stuff, but I think in general the avermedia gear requires a lot of software since they tend to lack hardware processing... I can't find anything about that card from a quick search.

 

pinsb, I did a dmesg | grep dvb and I got absolutely nothing.

 

You may be out of luck. It looks like the driver for the chipset was being developed, but it isn't ready for release and there's been no updates within the last 15 months. There's some user posts of folks trying to get it to work on various forum websites, but they seem to indicate that they weren't even able to compile the driver. You could try visiting the driver site, and getting some email addresses for some of the developers, and then pinging them and seeing if they have plans to develop the driver further.

saa7231 Driver Website (last change 08/09)
Ubuntu Users Forum Thread (04/09)
Linux.com Forum Thread (01/10)
TechArena Forum Thread (10/10)
openSUSE Users Forum Thread (11/10)

If you really wanted to watch TV under Linux on your laptop, you could always check out the USB TV Tuners that are better supported under Linux, on wiki sites such as this one. Lastly, there was this blog post that describes how to get a Dell XPS laptop with a built in TV Tuner working correctly. However, I believe that the TV Tuner hardware there, is made by SIANO, which is different than your TV Tuner.

Good Luck..

 

Jas,

Thanks a lot. I appreciate all your research. You've been a real trooper with this.

Thanks again!

Brent