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teras

Member

Registered: 2018-01-28

Posts: 24

My DVB-T USB stick is not properly recognized (any more)

Hello community and thanks for the hospitality.

I need your help for setting my DVB-T USB stick which used to work in the past (like 10 years ago), forgot in a drawer, and now when I tried to use it it doesn't work any more.

I have the Pinnacle Hybrid Pro USB stick which is shown as "Bus 001 Device 015: ID eb1a:2881 eMPIA Technology, Inc. EM2881 Video Controller"

I have installed practically every package it seems to me that it is required, and indeed the stick is recognized; even was able to scan channels (according to DVB-T tutorial. Kaffeine is even able to list channels, both radio and TV. BUT there is no image. On radio channels things are even more spooky. I can hear sound (that reminds the actual sound that I should listen to) but strongly distorted.

When I watch using dmesg for messages when loading, I think there's some kind of misconfiguration and being picked up as a Zarlink device (which is not) instead of Pinnacle Hybrid Pro, which is what was found in the beginning.
Since this Zarlink device seems to have properties "frontend 0", (i.e. maybe the first in the list?) it looks for me like the dvb was setting the device info wrongly although it knows what is it.

At the end of this post is the dmesg output.
Maybe I am missing something else but can you give me some pointers what to do? Some random (really old) posts suggest to add a module parameter like 'options em28xx card=20' (or similar) but I can't find any documentation on this issue.

Can you help?

[   66.092086] usb 1-10: new high-speed USB device number 15 using xhci_hcd
[   66.232421] usb 1-10: config 1 interface 0 altsetting 1 endpoint 0x82 has invalid wMaxPacketSize 0
[   66.235267] usb 1-10: New USB device found, idVendor=eb1a, idProduct=2881, bcdDevice= 1.00
[   66.235278] usb 1-10: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
[   66.235284] usb 1-10: Product: USB 2881 Video
[   66.274409] em28xx 1-10:1.0: New device  USB 2881 Video @ 480 Mbps (eb1a:2881, interface 0, class 0)
[   66.274414] em28xx 1-10:1.0: Video interface 0 found: isoc
[   66.274415] em28xx 1-10:1.0: DVB interface 0 found: isoc
[   66.328916] em28xx 1-10:1.0: chip ID is em2882/3
[   66.408469] em28xx 1-10:1.0: EEPROM ID = 1a eb 67 95, EEPROM hash = 0xb8846b20
[   66.408480] em28xx 1-10:1.0: EEPROM info:
[   66.408484] em28xx 1-10:1.0: 	AC97 audio (5 sample rates)
[   66.408486] em28xx 1-10:1.0: 	USB Remote wakeup capable
[   66.408489] em28xx 1-10:1.0: 	500mA max power
[   66.408492] em28xx 1-10:1.0: 	Table at offset 0x04, strings=0x206a, 0x006a, 0x0000
[   66.412033] em28xx 1-10:1.0: No sensor detected
[   66.412041] em28xx 1-10:1.0: Your board has no unique USB ID.
               A hint were successfully done, based on eeprom hash.
               This method is not 100% failproof.
               If the board were misdetected, please email this log to:
               	V4L Mailing List  <linux-media@vger.kernel.org>
               Board detected as Pinnacle Hybrid Pro
[   66.602100] em28xx 1-10:1.0: Identified as Pinnacle Hybrid Pro (card=53)
[   66.602110] em28xx 1-10:1.0: analog set to isoc mode.
[   66.602114] em28xx 1-10:1.0: dvb set to isoc mode.
[   66.602467] usbcore: registered new interface driver em28xx
[   66.618079] em28xx 1-10:1.0: Registering V4L2 extension
[   66.631165] tvp5150 7-005c: tvp5150 (4.0) chip found @ 0xb8 (1-10:1.0)
[   66.631168] tvp5150 7-005c: tvp5150am1 detected.
[   66.689492] tuner: 7-0061: Tuner -1 found with type(s) Radio TV.
[   66.693570] xc2028 7-0061: creating new instance
[   66.693571] xc2028 7-0061: type set to XCeive xc2028/xc3028 tuner
[   66.693656] em28xx 1-10:1.0: Config register raw data: 0x58
[   66.693860] xc2028 7-0061: Loading 80 firmware images from xc3028-v27.fw, type: xc2028 firmware, ver 2.7
[   66.693882] em28xx 1-10:1.0: AC97 vendor ID = 0xffffffff
[   66.694002] em28xx 1-10:1.0: AC97 features = 0xffff
[   66.694003] em28xx 1-10:1.0: Unknown AC97 audio processor detected!
[   66.845425] xc2028 7-0061: Loading firmware for type=BASE F8MHZ (3), id 0000000000000000.
[   67.847752] (0), id 00000000000000ff:
[   67.847760] xc2028 7-0061: Loading firmware for type=(0), id 0000000100000007.
[   67.864416] xc2028 7-0061: Loading SCODE for type=MONO SCODE HAS_IF_5320 (60008000), id 0000000f00000007.
[   68.111768] em28xx 1-10:1.0: V4L2 video device registered as video2
[   68.111779] em28xx 1-10:1.0: V4L2 VBI device registered as vbi0
[   68.112300] em28xx 1-10:1.0: V4L2 extension successfully initialized
[   68.112308] em28xx: Registered (Em28xx v4l2 Extension) extension
[   68.135832] em28xx 1-10:1.0: Binding DVB extension
[   68.456531] xc2028 7-0061: attaching existing instance
[   68.456533] xc2028 7-0061: type set to XCeive xc2028/xc3028 tuner
[   68.456535] em28xx 1-10:1.0: xc3028 attached
[   68.456536] dvbdev: DVB: registering new adapter (1-10:1.0)
[   68.456537] em28xx 1-10:1.0: DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (Zarlink ZL10353 DVB-T)...
[   68.456538] dvbdev: dvb_create_media_entity: media entity 'Zarlink ZL10353 DVB-T' registered.
[   68.456855] dvbdev: dvb_create_media_entity: media entity 'dvb-demux' registered.
[   68.458379] em28xx 1-10:1.0: DVB extension successfully initialized
[   68.458382] em28xx: Registered (Em28xx dvb Extension) extension

aldyrius

Member

Registered: 2015-12-31

Posts: 39

Re: My DVB-T USB stick is not properly recognized (any more)

When you say it used to work 10 years ago, was that on Linux, or Windows?

It could of course be a basic signal quality issue; are you using a good external antenna and have you tried repositioning it? If your FM radio reception is weak, TV channels will be, too.

Your `dmesg` looks OK, and according to this section of the driver code, there is a struct named `pinnacle_hybrid_pro_digital` with the comment, "zl10353 reset". This is likely a reference to the fact that this overall board, the Pinnacle Hybrid Pro, uses the Zarlink ZL10353 demodulator as one of several chips involved in the signal processing path. So I don't believe there is a misconfiguration; the detection of the Zarlink demod chip is a good thing, as with the `tuner`, `xc2028` and `tvp5150` modules.

It could also an issue requiring particular kernel module options, as you indicated; especially since the card does support both FM radio and TV reception. You may just have to search the Linux code itself to gain the knowledge as to what each particular option does. But you can start with:

systool -m em28xx -v

and look under Parameters, to see what options the module is currently running with. It could also involve module options to the aforementioned `tuner` module, etc.

You seem to be on a good troubleshooting path with Kaffeine, but it may help to try viewing the stream with other applications, such as scanning for channels with VLC compatibility as described here. You could also try the dvbv5 family of tools, and in particular, capturing a full MPEG-TS transport stream with with `dvbsnoop` as described here. That will make it easy to try opening the file for playback in any media player of your choice.