Artec USB DVB-T tuner card

I just purchased the Artec T14BR HD DVB-T TV tuner dongle for turning my old laptop into a MythTV box. It cost $46.90 including GST and postage from Deals Direct.

I now have a High Def set top box, with 80Gb hard drive for (essentially) $46.90. And if I want to make it a twin tuner HD STB, it's just another $46.90.

Here is the picture of the box:


And here are all the contents (note, no aerial, but I knew that):


And finally a close up of the interesting stuff:


The dongle has a window on either side, presumable for the IR reciever in the middle somewhere.

Support for Linux is supposedly good (stay tuned, haha!). lsusb identifies it as "Bus 001 Device 025: ID 05d8:810f Ultima Electronics Corp." The syslog output when I plug it in looks like this:

usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 25
usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=05d8, idProduct=810f
usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-3: Product: ART7070
usb 1-3: Manufacturer: Ultima
usb 1-3: SerialNumber: 001
usb 1-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

This isn't "the" laptop, so I don't have any drivers installed for it, hence that's all for now.

I'll let you know how it works in my next post.