Install Digital Now Quad Card on mythbuntu 10.10 64-bit

I found the Digital Now Quad Tuner card worked great in my mythtv server and was well worth the $199 AUD price tag. In fact, it’s probably the best tuner I have ever used with mythtv. However I did have to do a few things to get it to work, as it doesn’t work straight out of the box – at least on mythbuntu 10.10 64-bit with kernel 2.6.35-28. It doesn’t work on 11.04 on kernel 2.6.38-8. I googled around and put together the following to get it to work.

First of all you need to install all sorts of packages that are needed to compile the drivers. I’m not sure whether you need all of these, but if you install these you should be okay.

I did everything below as root.

apt-get install fakeroot build-essential
apt-get install crash kexec-tools makedumpfile kernel-wedge
apt-get install git-core libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
apt-get install libelf-dev libdw-dev asciidoc binutils-dev

do uname -a to get the current kernel version you are using.

root@clumix:~# uname -a
Linux clumix 2.6.35-28-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Tue Mar 1 14:39:03 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

now install the headers for that version. Example:

apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.35-28-generic

wget http://www.medianow.com.au/data/Linux4Quad2.zip

unzip the package by running this

unzip Linux4Quad2.zip

You should then have a directory called “Linux4Quad” – change to this directory

cd Linux4Quad

Untar the tar-bzip file in this directory.

tar jxvf digitalnow-quad.tar.bz2

You should now have a directory called “digitalnow-quad” – change to this directory.

cd digitalnow-quad

And now there is yet another tar-bzip file to uncompress. Don’t run the install.sh script as it won’t work.

tar jxvf v4l_dvb_digitalnow.tar.bz2

Now you need to modify the “.version” file under the “v4l” directory to match your kernel version.

VERSION=2
PATCHLEVEL:=6
SUBLEVEL:=35-28
KERNELRELEASE:=2.6.35-28-generic

Now you need to compile the software and this will take time to complete depending on your PC specs. I found on a quad core machine it took about 10 minutes. Run this from the “digitalnow-quad” directory.

make

Once this completes successfully you need to run this to install:

make install

then reboot the machine.

I found that for some reason my MCE remote stopped working. I suspect the mceusb module was being loaded incorrectly due to the installation of a custom v4linux drivers (or something silly). So I edited /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and add

blacklist mceusb

rebooted again and all worked fine.

Note: you may find that if you update you kernel that you will need to recompile and reinstall these drivers in order for the card to work again.