AVerMedia AVerTVHD MCE A180

An ATSC PCI card from AVerMedia.

The AVerTVHD MCE A180 is supported under Linux (added to kernel 2.6.15).

Overview/Features

There are also some OEM versions of the card, probably intended for media centre PCs from large vendors, that are stripped down -- the A/V inputs on the card have been removed.

Note: An AVerMedia press release (Jan 8 2007, CES) mentions them demonstrating an "updated AVerTVHD MCE A180". It does not indicate what updates have been made to the card.

Components Used

• Alps NIM
  • tuner ?
  • ATI Nxt2004 (digital demodulator for 8VSB & 256/64-QAM)
• Philips SAA7135 (A/V decoder & PCI bridge)

Making it Work

Firmware

This card requires a firmware file (dvb-fe-nxt2004.fw¹) for the demodulator, which can be obtained using the get_dvb_firmware perl script included in the kernel sources:

# cd /[kernel source directory]/Documentation/dvb/
# perl get_dvb_firmware nxt2004

Once the download is complete, place a copy of the firmware file in your /lib/firmware directory. (This directory may differ with some distros; consult your distro's documentation for the appropriate location).

Note 1: All devices that use the Nxt2004 demodulator are currently using a firmware version from the AVerTVHD MCE A180. As the firmware's code has not been discerned, it is unclear whether other firmwares for the Nxt2004 would have any affect on reception performance.

External Links

• http://www.aver.com/multimedia.html AVerMedia North America products website.