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After using my Myth box for just playing media from my networkfor a long time, I eventually decided to take the plunge and get a TV card, and use MythTV for what it was built for.

After doing my usual research routine I finally decided to go for the Happuage T-500 card. At first you may think this was a brave move, as earlier drivers for this card suffered from various problems, but based on my research and advice from other Myth builders including Gary Parker over at parker1.co.uk (I’ve learnt a lot from Gary’s tutorials they are definitely worth a peek), I concluded that the driver was now stable enough.

My only concern was what revision of the card I was going to receive. Was I going to be so unlucky and the receive the unsupported “Diversity” model. To be safe I was going to get the card from ebay, as most sellers were 100% confirming that their T-500 was the single antenna version and not the “Diversity” model. There was around 5 cards listed at the time, but the bidding was very competitive and most of the cards were going for a price close to the price of a brand new card.

Being unsuccessful on ebay, I ordered a card from Amazon for £55 only £10 more than what they are selling for on ebay.


My card arrived the next day, I was very excited and anxious at the thought of receiving a duff card. I opened the box and what did I find……. damn, the card has two antennas but there was no sign of the “Diversity” sticker. Amazon had shipped me a T-500 model 289 SL-289-V2.1-UK which according to the MythTv Wiki Page is a “Diversity” model, but it had a different revision number – rev 84109. Again reading the Myth Tv wiki page for this card suggests that it may be the same as the French model that it talks about which is supposedly has out-of-the-box support in ubunutu 8.10 but I’m using 8.04.

So what did i do? and did I get it to work?

The answer is YES I did get it to work, and its been working like a trouper ever since, recording all the programs that I’d hate to miss.

Getting it to work was quite simple really. I downloaded the source code for the V4L DVB drivers and compiled them. You need to make sure you have all the appropriate packages for compiling before proceeding, ie build-essentials, linux-headers etc. There is a HowTo on the V4L wiki page.Follow this howto and install the drivers.

Then I downloaded the required firmware, which you can find on this MythTv Wiki Page. I used version 1.10, but this card expects version 1.20 – just simply rename the 1.10 version to 1.20, and place it in the appropriate place for your linux distribution. The wiki page gives you an idea, mine is at /lib/firmware.

Viola there you have it – all you need to do now is run modprobe, or restart. Once you have got the driver module loaded run the following command:
dmesg | grep dvb

You should see the following output or something similar.

[ 28.418038] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-TD-500 (84xxx)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
[ 28.607298] dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw'
[ 29.322300] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-TD-500 (84xxx)' in warm state.
[ 29.322349] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
[ 29.733360] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
[ 30.064915] dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-TD-500 (84xxx) successfully initialized and connected.
[ 30.065049] usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_dib0700

As you can see the driver has been loaded and my card is ready to rock. All I need to do now is set it up in Mythtv…….. to follow!