Digital Devices Cine CT V6 and MythTV – DVB-C with UPC Cablecom

Since my first MythTV system I relied on analog PAL TV. When digital TV was introduced by UPC Cablecom in Switzerland it was mandatory to use their cable box, all channels were encrypted. Now of course it would have been possible to use an IR blaster to control that unit and digitize the output of the set-top box.  It took a few years but now FTA digital (and partly HD) TV is available in Switzerland on UPC Cablecom’s network.

As before I wanted a dual tuner card that would allow me to record one show while watching another. After a bit of research I found only Digital Devices Cine CT V6 Card would fit the bill. It is a PCIe 1x card that is downright tiny, about the size of a business card. Compared to my analog Hauppauge PVR-500 this is a nice development. The Cine CT V6 is a hybrid dual tuner card that either takes a DVB-C or DVB-T signal on either of its tuners that records straight into h.264. or MPEG2. yay!

The card can be upgrade with a DuoFlex CT card that adds another two tuners – all running off the same PCIe slot. And if that is not enough that system can yet be upgraded with an Octopus bridge bringing up to 8 tuners to one PCIe port.

There is even the possibility to include CI modules. It almost seems like the card we’ve all been waiting for.

And best of all, Linux driver support is there too.

I am currently running kernel 3.2.0. Driver support should be built into kernels for versions greater 3.6. So I guess the whole process will be easier once 14.04 is released. For the time being on my Mythbuntu 12.04 installation was straight forward.

The installation consists of two parts:

• driver
• firmware

[Edit]

As of today this will only work up to Ubuntu 14.04

Instead of building your own drivers, you can also just add the following to /etc/apt/sources list for your Mythbuntu 12.04 system:

afterwards it is a simple run of

and you should be good to go!

The package linux-media-dkms takes care of everything. After rebooting or manually adding the needed kernel modules, you should see the adapters as

frontend0 is used for DVB-C whereas frontend1 would be used for DVB-T.  Switching between the two is done via software.

Now you simply modify your entries in mythbackend-setup for the new cards and input connections and make a full channel scan in MythTV.