Ummm.. right... 

When I moved to Germany,  I discovered one of the many little known quirks of life in Germany... the availability of cable television in a rental apartment is only available if the landlord sees fit to provide a connection.  Where I live, cable television is not available.  There is a cable television connection in the living room wall, but it's not connected to anything.

There are other options... satellite, TV over IP, and DVB-T.  Satellite isn't a real option for me though because I would have to place the dish on the street side of the building, and I am on the ground floor.  I tried TV over IP, but the quality of the broadcast was poor, and it cut deeply into my available internet bandwidth if I had the television turned on.  That left DVB-T.  I tried it once, and couldn't get a decent signal, so I decided enough, and went without television for the past year.

Anyway, I'm getting to my point... this week I decided to have another go at getting DVB-T working.  I bought a Hauppauge USB DVB-T tuner (the HVT-900-H) which promptly didn't work.  I did some digging and discovered I had bought the wrong one.  Ooops.  The 900-H is based on a new chipset that is not yet supported in Linux.  That will teach me not to do my research first.

A little pre-purchase research later I discovered that I could probably get the Hauppauge Nova-T USB DVB-T tuner and it should... in theory.. work in Linux.  So, I wander down to the local electronics store and pick up a Hauppauge Nove-T-Lite USB DVB-T tuner (same as the Nova-T, but without the IR remote control). 

This tuner doesn't work without a little tinkering... but the tinkering amounts to very little.  Basically I had to download the latest v4l source, su to root, and then type make, and make install.  This all went smoothly.  I plugged in the tuner.. still nothing.  dmesg had a clue though... the tuner was found, and the system attempted to start it up but was missing some firmware.  A quick look in the firmware directory of the v4l source, and there it was.  I copied it over to /lib/firmware, and plugged the tuner back in.  Whiz bang it works!

Ten minutes of tinkering in the MythTV setup to tell it there was now a tuner connected, and to tell it to go scan for available channels and I was up and running.  MythTV has loads of nice little functions like downloading the channel icons, providing on screen programming guides and so one.  Very nice.

So... after a year without television (and not really missing it) I am back in couch potato land.  Hmmmm was I better off without television?