After a long month of hard work, I am finally able to drop a few lines about my last computer results. Not much, considering how busy i was with my regular job, but anyway something.
Pinnacle Hybrid PCTV USB Stick (aka 330e)
[ID 2304:0226 Pinnacle Systems, Inc.] as for lsusb
I bought this device almost 18 months ago (if i remember well) and I managed to let it work in the DVB-T mode. The main problem was not the Empia chip this stick is based on, but rather the Micronas DRX3975d DVB-T demodulator. This chip was not yet supported by any kernelspace driver. A really smart German guy, Markus (www.mcentral.de) managed to get the specs for this demodulator directly from Micronas and finally managed to write a working driver.
The story for tis driver is rather long, and includes a long debacle on the linuxtv mailing list: the topic was the choice Markus adopted of writing an userspace driver rather than a kernelspace one. I don’t have the competences to understand the real differences in these two points of view, but in fact Markus, right or wring in his decision, is the only one who managed to write a driver for this device. Finally, thus, I managed to compile the driver for my USB TV stick and watch digital video broadcasting television.
I followed few easy steps to install it on my Gentoo box, posted by Markus on the mcentral.de mailing list. Up to this point i was using the v4l-dvb-experimental kernel module Markus himself wrote and that can be found on the mercurial repository at mcentral.de
Continue reading Digital Video Broadcasting: Pinnacle 330e