a usb dvb stick that works nicley with a20

[codifies]

So after being away for a while from my a20 (honeymoon!)

After all the dust had settled I managed to get to my local PC part supplier and despite expectations I found a really reasonably priced *dual* tuner usb dvb (digital TV) stick   < £20 but it end of line so be quick - probably because it looks like its SD only, but for bandwidth reasons I'm fine with that...

Installation consisted of looking in dmesg and finding a firmware file and putting it where I was told (I later realised I hadn't bothered installing the Debian firmware package)

the USB id of the device is  2040:5200 (Its a Hauppauge device)

So much for the myth that installing hardware is hard in Linux

anyhoo what I wasn't expecting was the ball-ache that was the selection of a frontend!

Playing on my laptop enabled me to evaluate different frontends and I plumped for Kaffeine - simply because it was the one that worked with the least drama...

Unfortunatly the package for Kaffeine in the arm repo seemed to stop playing immediatly after selecting a channel - on the plus side the channel scanning is faster than my telly! (and actually works unlike some tools!)

Like xine till I set the video output to Xshm it was complaining of Bad Match missing extention 132 (anyone know what extension 132's actual name is - googling seemed to pick up a lot of splurious 132's line line numbers etc!) 

I decided to pull the source from kde's git server (git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kaffeine) and after installing some dependencies (it seems to be using the VLC backend which is fine by me - you can usually throw any rubbish at that player and it just works)

I'm guessing the Debian package is using some other backend like xine thats not listening to the xine settings or using some other settings elsewhere....

So the long and short of it I can watch TV on the A20 using this device, it seems to use between 25% and 50% of both cores - shockingly an app that is genuinely multi threaded?

I've not investigated recording just yet but with a decent backing store I don't see why it couldn't record two channels (or even more if the channels are all on the same 2 bundles....)

I may later investigate some methods of turning it into a headless recorder to network storage, but I've been LESS than impressed with the likes of MythTV and their likes (so much for the KISS princaple)

I'd be interested to learn others experiences with PVR / DVB stuff - or thoughts / ideas...