Since I have an inbuilt TV Tuner card on my Dell XPS 1640, I wanted to watch TV after I installed Ubuntu 10.04 . I had earlier watched TV on my Windows 7 partition. However, after I installed the required software, Me-TV, I found out that there was no driver in the Ubuntu default installation for this particular TV Tuner card. Infact, there is no firmware easily available on linux for this card. After much googling, I found a French website, which had a link to a newly developed firmware for this hardware.
You can download the firmware from here.
Once downloaded, rename the file to sms1xxx-nova-b-dvbt-01.fw and copy the file to /lib/firmware. Use the commands below
sudo mv sms1xxx-hcw-55xxx-dvbt-01.fw sms1xxx-nova-b-dvbt-01.fw
sudo cp sms1xxx-nova-b-dvbt-01.fw /lib/firmware
Restart you computer to get the firmware loaded.( If anyone knows a better way of loading the firmware, without a restart I mean, please let me know)
After the firmware is loaded, you would need a TV viewing software.I use Me-TV. This is a very easy to use gnome project, no hassles of configuration like MythTV.
Add the ppa and install the software. Here are the commands
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:me-tv-development/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install me-tv
You will find Me-TV installed under Applications-> Sound & Video
Thats it. Enjoy Live TV on your laptop.
Thanks to Pixel du Rezo
A great find! well done.
I am also using both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 on my xps 1640.
Is this ‘firmware’ written to the tv tuner? And if so does following this method cause any change to the functionality of the tuner within Windows?
(I had some fun getting the tuner to work with Windows 7 in the first place, agreeing to PlayReady licence locked the tuner out of media center)
Thanks