Also see GoodKernelAndDriver

TBS6981¶

This is a reasonable (price v performance) dual S2 tuner. Adam used one for some time when he first started out with TVH, however he's now upgraded to a TBS6985 that was donated by TBS.

Unlike some other cards TeVii-S480 it's a native PCIe interface and not a PCIe to USB bridge.

Driver Support¶

Official TBS driver¶

TBS provide official (out of tree) kernel drivers which can be downloaded from here. These are a bit of a pain to build as they are bundled with a massive set of drivers, most of which you don't need, but are enabled by default.

The following instructions give a simple set of instructions, that at the time of writing, provide a quick and easy way to get just the 6981 driver compiled.

1. Download from "here":http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/#tbs6981
2. mkdir tbs; cd tbs; unzip DOWNLOAD.zip
3. tar xf linux-tbs-drivers.tar.bz2
4. find -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
5. chmod 755 linux-tbs-drivers/v4l/scripts/*
6. find linux-tbs-drivers -name “*.sh” -exec chmod 755 {} \;
7. cd linux-tbs-drivers/
8. ./v4l/tbs-x86_64.sh
9. Copy attached config to ./v4l/.config
10. make
11. mkdir tbs
12. find -name "*.ko" -exec cp {} tbs/ \;
13. tar jcf tbs-modules.tar.bz2 tbs
14. sudo tar -C /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -xf tbs-modules.tar.bz2
15. sudo depmod -a

Note: you can combine steps 11-14, it's just I build on diff machine to install.

Once installed you will need to reboot due to the way the driver is integrated.

Unofficial OSS driver¶

Recently there have been lots of problems with this card in relation to use with TVH. After lots of investigations we have concluded that unlike TBS's assertions this is in fact nothing to do with Tvheadend. It is in fact down to some very shoddy drivers that fail to protect against various shared bus accesses. This often manifests as one or other tuner completely failing.

If you are bored and fancy reading more details, I kept a short blog to cover the email thread between TBS and the Tvheadend Team. http://tvheadend.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/tbs-6981-debacle/

In response to all this Luis Alves decided to reverse engineer the 6981 driver (which may also work for the TBS6984, though there have been varying degrees of success there). You can find more details about his driver on his git hub page. https://github.com/ljalves/linux_media/wiki.