Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe and Linux support

I bought a USB TV card; a Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. There is only one program for Linux available: dunerec. Here is how I got it working:

1. Download and untar (tar -xvzf) dune2-linux.tar.gz
2. After untarring you have two directories: dunetools and dunelib, two shell scripts (which function escapes me) and one README.txt with some installation instructions. You don't need to compile anything, you just need to copy the executables (and some other files) into the correct directories: dunetools/dunerec/dunerec goes to /usr/local/bin dunetools/duneinit/duneinit goes to /usr/local/bin
3. You need to create the directory /usr/local/lib/dune
4. Now you need some files from the Windows program, that came together with the TV card. Obviously you need to have a Windows system and install the Program there first. You find the files yu need in "C:\Program Files\Pinnacle\Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe\Driver\". You need to copy the files ending with .v (k2.v, etc.), DuneNTSC.sys and DunePal.sys to the newly created directory /usr/local/lib/dune
5. As I am living in Europe, I need to use Pal.sys; therefore I rename it to dune.sys
6. chown root /usr/local/bin/dunerec chmod u+s /usr/local/bin/dunerec chown root /usr/local/bin/duneinit chmod u+s /usr/local/bin/duneinit
7. Scanning for channels is done with the command /usr/local/bin dunerec -i 0 -S 1 -d 1 Dune at 001/002 VID 2304 PID 061E Loading ezusb2 firmware... dune.sys: FWOff: 77736 FWLen: 10296 You have to restart the program! The "-d 1" option is only to print debugging information. You need to execute the command again, this is normal: dunerec -i 0 -S 1 >> /usr/local/lib/dune/channels.txt This command puts the output of the scanning into the file /usr/local/lib/dune/channels.txt; you still have to remove from this file the lines starting with .
8. The error message "Cannot find dune!" occurs when the TV card is not plugged into the computer. I had it also occur when the TV card was present and I needed to remove the card, restart and hotplug it again to make it working.
9. You should test whether the card is working: dunerec -R test.mpg -i 0 -a 479250 This records the TV signal on frequency 479.250 MHz into the file test.mpg. You can stop the recording with Ctrl-C and watch this mpg file with the video player of your choice. However, in order to watch live streaming TV, you need to pipe the data to a player. The only player I managed to get accepting the data is mplayer. There is a great rpm for Suse Linux 9.1 from Packman. Don't forget to download the rpm with all the codecs!
10. Here are some commands that I have used for piping: dunerec -R - -i 0 -a 479250 | mplayer -cache 8192 - You can adjust the cache size to reduce the waiting time to start playback. dunerec -R - -i 0 -a 479250 | mplayer -framedrop -vo x11 - Without cache you need to allow the player to drop frames. dunerec -i 0 -a 479250 -t dvd -R - | mplayer -ao arts -vo xv -double -cache 4096 -framedrop - This is the complete command that I use now. I copied it from the gtk2 GUI.
11. GTK2 GUI for TV card "Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe" http://pctvgtk.sourceforge.net". The installation work according to the instructions and the stuff really works. I had some problems with the scanning. it didn't find all programs. I had to do the scanning under Windows (using the Pinnacle program) and then write down the frequencies and add them manually to the channels.txt files. But that went also without problems.