Seite 64 - TELE-satellite-1201

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12-01/2012
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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 12-01/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
DVB-T/C-CI
Impressive professional card for IPTV
servers and multimedia centers that is
loaded with the latest technologies for
long-term use
A Professional card for
professional applications
under Linux
The NetUP Dual DVB-T/C-
CI is being offered as a pro-
fessional DVB-C and DVB-T
PCI-e adapter and is being
primarily marketed for use
in IPTV servers. When the
adapter arrived at our TELE-
satellite test labs in an unre-
markable package, we were
a little concerned at first
when we opened the pack-
age and couldn’t find any
trace of a user manual or
quick start guide; not even
a driver CD could be found!
As it turns out, if you pay
a visit to the manufacturer’s
web site you’ll find a brief
overview of how to install
this adapter under Linux. It
is necessary to recompile
the kernel in a NetUP modi-
fied kernel version 3.0.0-rc7.
Prepared software has to be
put together by the custom-
ers themselves. The card is
tested with tzap and czap.
It’s obvious that we’re not
dealing with a consumer
product here but rather a
professional product. Linux
experience is required so
that the card can even be
recognized by the operating
system.
The manufacturer wasn’t
neglectful in including a
written description, it’s just
a simple consequence of
the brand new hardware
components that are used.
The chips are very new and
boast high power in a small
space: A DVB-C or DVB-T
signal can be placed on ei-
ther of the two tuners. There
are also two CI slots. The in-
ternal components consist
of a Conexant CX23885 that
can handle two MPEG trans-
port streams and works with
an integrated Sigma-Delta
ADCs with 4:2 MUX.
There’s also an extreme-
ly energy efficient STM
STV0367 ultra compact
combination DVB-T/C single
chip receiver on board. This
comes with 6, 7 or 8 Mhz
bandwidth as well as QPSK,
16 QAM and 64 QAM modu-
lations. 16, 32, 64, 128 and
256 constellations are sup-
ported in DVB-C mode.
The tuners are Xceive
XC5000 Silicon tuners that
don’t need any kind of me-
tallic shielding thus making
them easier to incorporate
onto the circuit board. These
tuners support all the TV
standards and have excep-
tional sensitivity even with
weaker signals.
For the CI slots an Altera
FPGA is available. This chip
is a programmable proces-
sor and by that we mean
the software based arrange-
ment of the function struc-
ture. This makes it theoreti-
cally possible to modify the
CI interface to work with
new developments.
After the installation of the
hardware in the PC, a Linux
distribution must then be in-
stalled. For our case we se-
lected an up to date Ubuntu
Distribution since it can be
installed rather quickly and
not necessarily because of
the popularity of this Linux
distribution with its good
support.
Once Linux has been in-
stalled, the Kernel, the cen-
tral component of any Unix
operating system, must be
recompiled so that it can
then recognize the NetUP
card. Since the components
on the card are still quite
new, current Linux distribu-
tions with v2.6 won’t recog-
nize it.
NetUP provides some help
as can be seen in Figure 1.
However this newly installed
Ubuntu Linux won’t take you
all the way to the end since,
for example, GIT has not
yet been installed. Because
of this we went ahead as
described in Figure 2. Once
you have accessed “make
menuconfig”, three options
need to be activated. These
are described on the NetUP
website although in our tests
there were only slight differ-
ences. Figures 3, 4 and 5
show exactly what needs to
be changed.
The line “export CONCUR-
RENCY_LEVEL=3”
works
better with a multi-core
TEST REPORT
Professional PC Card