Drivers

The HVR-1300 card is like an HVR 1100 with an added hardware MPEG encoder. The Linux driver for the MPEG encoder is still in development and as far as I know is not usable yet. The HVR-1100 is supported in kernels >= 2.6.16. Even though the drivers for the HVR-1300 are the same, you will need to patch the kernel or to use a kernel >= 2.6.19, because the device identifier is not known to kernels <=2.6.18.

I have had the card work on Ubuntu Feisty (development branch) and Sabayon Linux 3.25.

On Ubuntu Feisty I run the following shell script to load the drivers :

rmmod tuner
rmmod cx88_dvb
rmmod cx88_alsa
rmmod cx8800
rmmod cx8802
rmmod cx88xx
rmmod tveeprom
rmmod cx22702
rmmod cx88_vp3054_i2c
rmmod btcx_risc
rmmod videodev
rmmod v4l1_compat
rmmod v4l2_common 
modprobe v4l2_common
modprobe v4l1_compat
modprobe videodev
modprobe cx88xx
modprobe cx22702
modprobe tuner
modprobe cx8800
modprobe cx8802
modprobe cx88_alsa
modprobe cx88_dvb

It seems the order in which the modules are loaded is important, hence the rmmod to remove a few modules that were automatically loaded. This script is probably not optimal and there must be a cleaner way to do this but it works.

Watching Terrestrial Digital TV

I watch Digital Terrestrial TV with Kaffeine which is very easy to configure: in the DVB configuration module, select your town, scan for channels and select the channels you want to add to the channels menu.

Watching Analog TV

  • Run tvtime.
  • In the menu "Setup/Input configuration/Television standard" choose your television standard (PAL, SECAM, NTSC, ...).
  • In the menu "Setup/Input configuration" select the video source : Television.
  • Quit tvtime.
  • Run tvtime-scanner.
  • Once the scan is complete, restart tvtime.
  • In the menu "Setup/Channel management/Frequency table" select Custom.

For analog TV, you have to route the sound from the sound system of the TV card (driver is cx88_alsa) to the main sound card like this :

arecord -D hw:1,0 -c 2 -r 48000 -f S16_LE -t wav | aplay - &

You can also watch from the card RCA video input with tvtime using the "composite1" video source instead of "television" and by adjusting the television standard.