The Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-TD-500 is a nice dual tuner DVB-T PCI card (well, actually it’s a PCI-USB thing and the system sees it as a USB device). It works out-of-the-box with the upcoming Fedora 16. It needs a firmware, but that’s available by default in the linux-firmware package.
However, when using the Nova-TD-500 with VDR a couple of settings need to be tweaked or the signal will eventually disappear for some reason. The logs (typically /var/log/messages in Fedora) will have something like this in them:
vdr: [pidnumber] PES packet shortened to n bytes (expected: m bytes)
Maybe the drivers or the firmware have a bug which is only triggered by VDR. This problem can be fixed by tweaking VDR’s EPG scanning settings. I’ll post the settings here in case someone is experiencing the same problems. These go into /etc/vdr/setup.conf in Fedora:
EPGBugfixLevel = 0
EPGLinger = 0
EPGScanTimeout = 0
It is my understanding that these settings will disable all EPG scanning which is done in the background and VDR will only scan the EPGs of the channels on the transmitters it is currently tuned to. In Finland, most of the interesting free-to-air channels are on two transmitters and the Nova-TD-500 has two tuners, so in practice this should not cause much problems with outdated EPG data.
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