AVerMedia A180 Capture Card

This card is billed as a much better card than the pcHDTV HD-5500 card by those who use it. It is not a low profile card so, if you need that feature, you're out of luck. But, if you have room in your system for a full-height card, you might want to give it a spin (its cheaper too). Unfortunately, as with most things Mythbuntu, plug and play is not going to happen. Let the goat rope begin.

First, under Mythbuntu 8.04LTS, support for the card is not built-in (despite the fact that there is a saa7134 driver included). However, later versions support it (possibly through the saa7133 driver), in which case you'll be able to skip the driver installation step.

Despite which driver is used, in all cases so far, to get support for this card, you do need to download some firmware. Downloading the firmware is accomplished through a simple, little, 500-line script that is included in the kernel documentation. You can download the entire set of kernel documentation, for example:

     sudo apt-get install linux-doc-2.6.24
     cd /usr/share/doc/linux-doc-2.6.24/Documentation/dvb
     sudo gzip -d get_dvb_firmware.gz
     sudo chmod +x get_dvb_firmware

Or, if you simply want to get the script (sure seems easier to us), you can find it at:

     http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/dvb/get_dvb_firmware

Click the link that says "Remove Line Numbers" and then copy the script and paste it into a file. Make sure you include a newline on the last line and remove any <CR>s if you used Windoze to create it. Then:

     chmod ugo+x get_dvb_firmware

Before you run the script, you must have the unzip command installed. You can do this with:

     sudo apt-get install unzip

Create a directory for downloaded firmware and change to it. Then, download the firmware using the script:

     get_dvb_firmware nxt2004

Copy the firmware to your kernel's firmware directory:

     sudo cp dvb-fe-nxt2004.fw /lib/firmware/`uname -r`

For later versions of Mythbuntu, the kernel version is left off of the firmware directory so the copy looks like this:

     sudo cp dvb-fe-nxt2004.fw /lib/firmware

On earlier versions of Mythbuntu, the next step is to blacklist the old saa7134 driver (so that it won't try to screw things up):

     sudoedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

After a certain point in the Mythbuntu version sequence, all blacklist files must end with ".conf". If you see such files in "/etc/modprobe.d", you should instead do:

     sudoedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Add the following lines to the blacklist file:

     # Get rid of the old saa7134 driver. We have a newer one from AVerMedia.
     blacklist saa7134

Then, we need to load the new, DVB saa7134 driver. To do so, hack "/etc/modules":

     sudoedit /etc/modules

Add the following lines to the modules file:

     # Load the newer saa7134 DVB driver.
     saa7134-dvb

With the later versions of Mythbuntu (e.g. 12.04) that support this card through the saa7133, you simply need to tell the system which driver should be used for the card. To do this, we add a few lines to the "/etc/modprobe.d/options" file (which you may have to create). Using the editor, add the following (for two cards):

     # The AverMedia A180 cards are autodetected as saa7133 cards.  We need
     # to force them to use the saa7134 driver.
     options saa7134 card=75,75

There is no need to blacklist the 7134 driver. In fact, if you do, the cards won't operate properly. Just add the lines above to the "options" file. Confused by all this? You can find further help at:

     http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/AVerMedia_AVerTVHD_MCE_A180

As noted for the other capture cards, above, once you've made all of your changes, you should reboot the system a few times to be sure that what you've done works.

You can now set up the A180 capture cards that you have installed in your system through the MythTV backend configuration. Note that you should always set up the capture cards from AVerMedia as DVB cards. The proper choice is "DVB DTV capture card (v3.x)".

As with the pcHDTV cards, for these cards, a couple of options that you will probably want to use are:

     Recording Options
     Max Recordings: 1
     Open DVB Card on demand: (check)

The HowTo for this card can by found in the MythTV wiki:

     http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/AVerTV_HD_A180

Also, this card is quite similar to the ATI HDTV Wonder card so these installation instructions might be useful for it too.