TBSDTV Community Forum

I am definitely interested as I bought one just for Raspberry Pi.

Please post the details.

I edited http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/T ... ner_TV_Box a while ago to include:

"however some binary blobs are needed and only provided for x86 and x86_64 (tbs5280fe_driver*.o.*)"

.. but would like to be able to change that to something else.

Ray.

Hi Ray

I am right in the middle of moving house, and have no internet connection at the moment (except at work as I am now).

Once I get a connection back I will document the steps and step you through it.

Before you start on this though, a word of warning.

The Pi shares the I/O bandwidth it possesses between the USB and the Ethernet connection. In other words, if you are receiving a HD stream through the tuner into USB and then trying to write it out to an external network connection you may well struggle for bandwidth.

I have no tried writing to a large mem card, nor a USB attached HDD though, but you need to be aware that after a lot of compiling and work you are up against the max bandwidth of the PI for HD streams.

I'll post back when I have more time.

Steve

OK. Really quickly (let me know if you need more depending upon your experience in this area).

Basically there are a number of things you need to do. One of them is recompile the kernel. The reason you need to recompile the kernel is to make sure that your kernel headers are in line with the kernel itself.

So, plan goes :
* Download and recompile the kernel source. This will probably take 5-6 hours unless you have a cross compiler.
* Download Crazycats full V4L source with changes to support the TBS card

Note what he says though. He supports the card by changing one of the OTHER cards in such a way as to convince the kernel to use the wrong driver. This means that when you config the compile you must disable the TBS cards. Make sure to compile in the card that Crazycat mentions in his post which is the one which DOESN'T need the binaries.

* Compile as normal a make install.
* Reboot

Things to note
* BOTH tuners will be available. Crazycat states he wasn't sure, but I can validate that it sees each tuner on the board, and they work independently of each other
* Since it is a common interface all software (TvHeadend for example) will work nicely with the cards.
* If you are recording a HD stream, then where you store it is critical. The USB and network interfaces share a limited bandwidth making the Pi unable to deal with too much going on.

Good luck!
Steve

Thanks Steve.

Building cross compilers is my thing (I hack on crosstool-ng), so I can build cross compilers for Raspi easily (hosted on Windows and Darwin too).

I will attempt the kernel recompile when I get my TODO list down to something less scary; hopefully in a few weeks.

madasahatter wrote:Hi all

Not sure whether anyone is interested, but I have managed to get the TBS5280 to work with Raspberry Pi.

While it is early days, so the system hasn't been up for days and days yet, it has recorded two HD channels at the same time and written to an external drive which worked really well.

If anyone is interested, I can put the steps up. you have to recompile your RPi Kernel...

None of it would have worked without Crazycats hard work though, so a great deal of thanks are due to him. And for the record BOTH tuners work completely fine.

Steve

Hi Steve,

Just wondering how you went with it being stable or not?

Can I use same drivers for 5821?

Thanks
Brian