TBS tuner ? The wrong tuner card for Linux!

Since 6 months I bought a new satellite dish, which point to Astra so I can improve my Deutsch :). I used an old Pinnacle card as a receiver, but this old card doesn’t support dvb-s2. On the same machine I have two other cards:

  • TerraTec Cinergy T PCIe dual
  • Technisat Skystar2 PCI DVB-S

Recently some German channels (Das Erste HD, Arte HD,  ZDF HD,…) started to transmit in HD using the dvbs2 standard, so I decided to buy a new card. the requirements where very simple:

  • low profile, so if I decide to buy a new case I can choose a smaller one
  • support for dvb-s2
  • compatible with linux, without too much pain (based on my experience on linux there is always some pain)
  • remote not needed, in fact for me a new remote is simply a new trash
  • not too expensive, in fact i replace an already working card

After googling around for a while I found the card that looked good for my needs, and reading the instructions the driver seems really simple to install, my choice was the TBS6922. A few days later the card is delivered and in a few minutes the card gets installed. I follow strictly the build instructions and surprise surprise… the card works, but my TerraTec Cinergy T PCIe dual doesn’t work anymore. I lost a whole day trying to make everything work and at the end I also upgraded my HTPC station to the unstable release of Ubuntu 13.04 getting each hour more and more angry, and with kernel 3.8.?? the driver doesn’t build anymore.

What the people in TBS call driver is in fact a the whole kernel module for video, including the base video, video_buf, video_dvb and all other video/card drivers from an old version of linux! Yes! Your system gets downgraded, in fact if you install the TBS driver all your kernel modules in kernel/drivers/video get downgraded to an older version and you will never ever know which older version it is. So you will experiment things not working, bugs out-coming, compatibility issues and all you can thing about when you install old (obsolete) things on newer system with recent hardware.

What TBS developer should do is simply inform better on their site that they make their hardware working on linux by potentially braking the functionality of other hardware. Technically the approach approach should  be a dkms module like nvidia or others.

I’m still waiting from the TBS people a solution to my issue, perhaps I will receive an answer only after the  TerraTec Cinergy T PCIe dual has become obsolete…hope someone on the internet will help. If you have some hint please write me 🙂

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