Pinnacle PCTV USB2

Introduction
This HOWTO intends to describe how to get the Pinnacle PCTV USB2 TV tuner to work on Gentoo. This will guide through the configuration of the minimum required to have an image and the sound working. There is no indication on how to get the remote working.

Modules installation
As it appears from the linux TV wiki, only the Pinnacle PCTV version with the vendor ID 0x2304 and product ID 0x0208 seems to work. To know you vendor ID and product ID, use (part of the usbutils package) after having connected your PCTV card:

To get everything to work, use the latest modules provided by the portage and not the ones in the kernel. First, remove the v4l options of your kernel:

Emerge the latest modules:

The Pinnacle PCTV USB2 uses the em28xx driver. To configure it, edit the /etc/modules.d/em28xx file as follow (you may have to create it):

The "card" and "tuner" value are likely to change to make yours work. Here is the list of the available cards.

For the list of tuners, check this list. When you plug your PCTV USB2 device, check dmesg to see if the module loads fine and if your card correspond to your device.

Getting the sound to work
To get the PCTV USB2 device sound to work, you have to help the kernel to recognize it as an external USB audio card. To so so, you need to activate the snd-usb-audio module. This howto uses the OSS emulation (a native ALSA solution is given here):

Now, when you plug your device, the snd-usb-audio module should be loaded. If you check your /dev directory, before you plug your device, you should see the /dev/dsp file which corresponds to your sound card.

/dev/dsp When you plug you PCTV USB2, a new sound card is detected and the file /dev/dspx (where x = 1 or 2 or ...) is created.

/dev/dsp /dev/dsp1

Watching TV
At this stage, you should be able to have your TV tuner working. You can use tvtime to watch TV (or mplayer):

If you start blankly tvtime, you will not have the sound working. This is due to the fact the the PCTV USB is seen as an external USB audio card. Therefore, you need to pipe the sound from that sound card to your PC one (for those who have a PCI TV tuner know that you need to physically plug the sound out from the tuner to the line in of your card). As here, there is no cable, we will use the software sox:

So to start the TV, use the following script (taken from here): watch_tv

And now, you should be enjoying your PCTV!

External references

 * Installation and setup of the em28xx linux driver for analogue devices like the PCTV analog USB 2 (150e/55e) in opensuse 10.2
 * Pinnacle PCTV USB2
 * Sound question and report of a success with Dazzle To Go
 * V4l repository
 * French tutorial and some info useful maybe for the remote control