{"id":733,"date":"2006-09-05T16:33:02","date_gmt":"2006-09-05T06:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/05\/twinhan-usb-dtv-dongle-not-working\/"},"modified":"2006-09-05T16:33:02","modified_gmt":"2006-09-05T06:33:02","slug":"twinhan-usb-dtv-dongle-not-working","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/05\/twinhan-usb-dtv-dongle-not-working\/","title":{"rendered":"Twinhan USB DTV dongle not working :("},"content":{"rendered":"

so after doing some researching (read: using search engines with linux + product name), I came to the conclusion that a Twinhan USB2.0 DVB dongle would be the dongle for me. Yes – it’s small, compact and does digital tv without requiring a non-existant free PCI slot in my Shuttle MythTV box.<\/p>\n

Having had great success with my last bit of new hardware (a really cheap Logitech QuickCam Express or something) – plug it in and it “just works”. Oh Linux how you are better than Microsoft Windows for hardware usability!<\/p>\n

But this was not to be. It uses a vp7045 chipset, which has drivers both in Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper”<\/a> and in the latest v4l-dvb<\/a> hg tree.<\/p>\n

But for the life of me I couldn’t get it to tune into any TV stations (for those of you who like using hardware and not just having expensive boxes around, you will appreciate how tuning into a TV station is rather important functionality for a TV card). So I started having a look around the interweb for possible answers.<\/p>\n

The best I could come up with was “are you sure you have all the cables plugged in” – yes, I was.<\/p>\n

So seeing as this is the first digital TV dongle in this house, I wondered if the signal just wasn’t getting here. I got a friend to bring around a spare digital set top box. It worked fine. Brilliantly in fact – it even worked with the shitty small antenna that came with the dongle. So it wasn’t an ability to receive.<\/p>\n

I then came across this post<\/a> to the linux-dvb list titled “New VP7045 with TDA10046 instead of MT352 (was: VP7045 tuner doesn’t work)”. Which really does hint at the problem!<\/p>\n

I could be one of the lucky ones with a new revision that uses the TDA10046 instead of the MT352! (after getting some debug info from the card out of the driver – it was reporting itself as v1.02, so quite possible).<\/p>\n

Maybe time to hack the dvb driver for it? Things seem pretty modular, so it couldn’t be too hard, right?<\/p>\n

Well, the vp7045-fe.c file is the front end (well, what it assumes is the front end) for the vp7045.c dongle. So all I really need to do is to get it to use the tda10046 frontend (under frontends\/tda1004x.c) instead of the vp7045-fe.c fe code.<\/p>\n

Well, it seems as though the tda10046 is an i2c device while the vp7045-fe isn’t. Hrrm… I’ve never really done much with i2c, so this’ll be fun!<\/p>\n

I’ve currently managed to hack the driver so that we do some things to do with the tda chip – although i haven’t gotten in detecting the i2c adapter – which means we’re never going to get a front end! (in fact, when you plug in the device with my modified driver you get a “no frontend detected” message from the kernel).<\/p>\n

i’ve tried poking on the #linuxtv channel on freenode to no avail – so it seems like i’m on my own for a bit.<\/p>\n

A good way to spend midnight until 3am though :)<\/p>\n

I’ll probably end up doing the same tonight. Why? Because it’s just so much fun.<\/p>\n

Oh, and if anybody has any pointers – it would be appreciated.<\/p>\n

I am, of course, assuming the hardware itself isn’t faulty. I have no MS Windows system around to test on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

so after doing some researching (read: using search engines with linux + product name), I came to the conclusion that a Twinhan USB2.0 DVB dongle would be the dongle for me. Yes – it’s small, compact and does digital tv … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool-gadgets","category-linux-kernel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5a6n8-bP","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":68,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2003\/03\/16\/netbsd-alpha\/","url_meta":{"origin":733,"position":0},"title":"NetBSD Alpha","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2003-03-16","format":false,"excerpt":"got it booting! got it nfsmounting \/ and have a console up. It is thought of some that I won't be able to get X going under NetBSD. I'll give it a try (there's some almost-docs outh there). If it doesn't work, then maybe I'll just have to settle for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "cool gadgets"","block_context":{"text":"cool gadgets","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/cool-gadgets\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4409,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/15\/switching-to-iphone-part-2-seriously\/","url_meta":{"origin":733,"position":1},"title":"Switching to iPhone Part 2: Seriously?","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2018-12-15","format":false,"excerpt":"In which I ask of Apple, \"Seriously?\". That was pretty much my reaction with Apple sticking to Lightning connectors rather than going with the USB-C standard. Having USB-C around the place for my last two (Android) phones was fantastic. I could charge a phone, external battery, a (future) laptop, all\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1191,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/04\/the-power-dongles-come-to-ruin-our-way-of-life\/","url_meta":{"origin":733,"position":2},"title":"the power dongles come to ruin our way of life","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2008-09-04","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently moved. I found enough of the power supplies for USB disk enclosures to power on the most crucial disks (read: the ones attached to mythtv). However, I have a disk I use for offsite backups. I need to find the dongle for it. Can I find it? No,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "life, the universe and everything"","block_context":{"text":"life, the universe and everything","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/life-the-universe-and-everything\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":863,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/13\/mythtv-and-poor-quality-dvb-reception\/","url_meta":{"origin":733,"position":3},"title":"MythTV and poor quality DVB reception","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2007-07-13","format":false,"excerpt":"So... I've been getting really poor DVB reception recently. I mean bad.... as in next to nothing is getting recorded... and anything HD is more noise than image (or sound). A symptom of this is that the mythbackend (and indeed frontend) can crash when processing really bad MPEG2 (recording) files.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "mythtv"","block_context":{"text":"mythtv","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/mythtv\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":248,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/20\/new-hardware\/","url_meta":{"origin":733,"position":4},"title":"new hardware","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2004-06-20","format":false,"excerpt":"A firewire card for my desktop (because my Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard's connectors DO NOT WORK, but this shintaro one does), a TV tuner card (now i need an ariel), and a new wireless card for my laptop (802.11g, not that i have a g access point, but this one\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3407,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/21\/misadventures-in-internet-access\/","url_meta":{"origin":733,"position":5},"title":"Misadventures in internet access","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2013-09-21","format":false,"excerpt":"So, around the time one would reasonably expect an extra tap to have been put on our ADSL line, we started getting relatively frequent drop outs. This was somewhat resolved for a while until a few months ago... when ADSL dropouts started occuring several times a day. Internode then informed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "life, the universe and everything"","block_context":{"text":"life, the universe and everything","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/life-the-universe-and-everything\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}