Oct 09, 2017 We found the best TV Tuner for Mac is the Geniatech EyeTV USB Tuner which is the best alternative to EyeTV for Mac. Although streaming sites such as Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon video have become the dominant way to stream video content on Mac, using a TV tuner is still the only way to pick up free-to-air and over-the-air (OTA) ATSC TV.
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- If you have cable TV (ClearQAM) at home: get the best out of it and receive the available digital HD channels on your Mac, at no additional cost. All of this power is available in an ultra compact designed form factor. The TV for Mac HD mini Stick includes a USB 2.0 powered TV tuner with integrated infrared (IR) receiver and a mini-remote control.
- If you want to watch or record TV on your PC and don’t want to spend a lot of money buying an expensive software then you can do it by using this TV tuner software, free download. This will be able to convert your PC into a TV with fine quality. USB TV tuner software can be used for high-quality videos and FM channels.
- Hauppauge Digital TV Tuner for Xbox One TV Tuners and Video Capture 1578. Type: USB TV Tuner Stick; Package Contents: Includes the USB TV Tuner, USB extension cable, telescoping antenna and Quick Install Guide. Model #: 1578; Return Policy: View Return Policy $.
Still have one of those old DVB-T/T2, DVB-C or DVB-S/S2 USB tuner sticks, laying around? Do not throw them away as you can use those tuners to build a network PVR!
Although these tuners, generally speaking, can not be used directly with NAS and Mac systems, we will build a small bridge to make it possible.
To do the job we would need a Raspberry Pi, minisatip software and TVMosaic.
So, let me show you how this can be done.
Although these tuners, generally speaking, can not be used directly with NAS and Mac systems, we will build a small bridge to make it possible.
To do the job we would need a Raspberry Pi, minisatip software and TVMosaic.
So, let me show you how this can be done.
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi is a popular, credit-card size, cheap minicomputer. If you already own one – great. If not, you can buy it from many places for around 40 euros. You would also need a case, power supply, and micro SD card. For our purpose, any micro SD card with the capacity of 2GB or more will do.
minisatip
minisatip is a lightweight linux-based sat>ip server, which creates a sat>ip server from locally connected tuners.
TVMosaic
TVMosaic is a popular cross-platform Personal Video Recorder software. Currently supported platforms include Windows, Ubuntu/Debian, MacOS, Raspberry Pi, and NAS models from Synology, ASUSTOR, QNAP and NETGEAR.
TVMosaic records your favorite TV programs in original quality directly to a hard disk of your host platform and lets you watch live and recorded TV content within your home network and on the go using free Android, iOS, tvOS, Kodi, desktop and DLNA clients.
TVMosaic records your favorite TV programs in original quality directly to a hard disk of your host platform and lets you watch live and recorded TV content within your home network and on the go using free Android, iOS, tvOS, Kodi, desktop and DLNA clients.
Let’s get started!
Assemble your Raspberry Pi and connect it to the network with a cable. Then, connect an antenna to your USB tuner and connect a tuner itself to one of Raspberry’s USB ports. If using a satellite tuner, always connect an antenna cable to a tuner first, then connect a power cable to a tuner and only then insert tuner into Raspberry’s USB slot!
The fully assembled system will look like this:
The fully assembled system will look like this:
The next step is to prepare a micro SD card for Raspberry Pi.
This step requires time and certain linux command line skills. It is a fun to do and I will provide you with the step by step instructions to accomplish the task.
However, if you just want to get it up and running as fast as possible without a hassle and a steep learning curve – I have prepared for you a ready-to-use disk image file.
This article will describe using this ready-to-use disk image file first.
If you would like to configure Raspberry Pi yourself or you already have a running Raspberry Pi and would like to add minisatip to it, please refer to the Preparing Raspberry Pi and building minisatip chapter at the end of this article.
This step requires time and certain linux command line skills. It is a fun to do and I will provide you with the step by step instructions to accomplish the task.
However, if you just want to get it up and running as fast as possible without a hassle and a steep learning curve – I have prepared for you a ready-to-use disk image file.
This article will describe using this ready-to-use disk image file first.
If you would like to configure Raspberry Pi yourself or you already have a running Raspberry Pi and would like to add minisatip to it, please refer to the Preparing Raspberry Pi and building minisatip chapter at the end of this article.
Prepare a micro SD card for Raspberry using the pre-built image file
The ready-to-use Raspberry Pi disk image is based on Raspbian Stretch Lite (release date: 2018-11-13, kernel version: 4.14) and minisatip version 0.7.16, compiled with s2api version: 050A. It contains originally missing firmware files for PCTV 292e, TT4400, PCTV 74e, PCTV 460e and PCTV 461e tuners.
The image also has ssh enabled (default user for logging in is pi and password raspberry).
Please, note that this image file cannot be used on Raspberry Pi 1. If you have Raspberry Pi 1, you need to configure and build all software manually as described later in this article.
Note that the instructions in this chapter describe the image writing process on Windows. if you have another desktop system, please refer to the Raspberry’s guide on how to do it there.
The image also has ssh enabled (default user for logging in is pi and password raspberry).
Please, note that this image file cannot be used on Raspberry Pi 1. If you have Raspberry Pi 1, you need to configure and build all software manually as described later in this article.
Note that the instructions in this chapter describe the image writing process on Windows. if you have another desktop system, please refer to the Raspberry’s guide on how to do it there.
- Download the ready-to-use image file and unzip it in some folder on your computer.
- Download and install Win32DiskImager.
- Connect a USB reader with a micro SD card to you computer. You need a micro SD card with a capacity of at least 2GB.
- Start Win32 Disk Imager as administrator, select image file and your USB reader drive, and press Write.
- Wait until writing is completed, close Win32 Disk Imager and safely remove the USB reader.
- Insert a micro SD card into Raspberry Pi and power Raspberry Pi on
- That’s it! Your Raspberry Pi is up and running.
Install TVMosaic
TVMosaic is a popular PVR software, which runs on many platforms – Windows, MacOS, Debian/Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, and NAS models from Synology, QNAP, ASUSTOR and NETGEAR. It lets you enjoy your favorite TV channels and recordings on a variety of network clients – desktop, DLNA, mobile – throughout the house.
TVMosaic works as freeware on desktop platforms – Windows, MacOS and Debian/Ubuntu. For headless platforms or to get advanced functionality on desktop platforms, you may need TVMosaic Plus license.
If you do not have TVMosaic installed yet, you can download it for your platform of choice from the TVMosaic official website. The installation instructions are described on the TVMosaic official Wiki.
Please note that if you are planning to run TVMosaic on a NAS or another headless platform, you need to download and install TVMosaic desktop version to do configuration.
TVMosaic works as freeware on desktop platforms – Windows, MacOS and Debian/Ubuntu. For headless platforms or to get advanced functionality on desktop platforms, you may need TVMosaic Plus license.
If you do not have TVMosaic installed yet, you can download it for your platform of choice from the TVMosaic official website. The installation instructions are described on the TVMosaic official Wiki.
Please note that if you are planning to run TVMosaic on a NAS or another headless platform, you need to download and install TVMosaic desktop version to do configuration.
Channel scan
To scan TV channels, start TVMosaic desktop client. Once it is started, make sure that you are connected to the correct TVMosaic server by checking the server address at the top of the TVMosaic window.
Navigate to Channels/Scan tab.
If everything is functioning properly, you should see one or more autodetected entries of minisatip (x.x.x.x) tuners:
Navigate to Channels/Scan tab.
If everything is functioning properly, you should see one or more autodetected entries of minisatip (x.x.x.x) tuners:
Unfortunately, there are several quirks here that you have to be aware of:
- sat>ip standard is only applicable to DVB tuners. So this method will not work if you have ATSC or ClearQAM signal.
- It is not possible to visually distinguish tuners, connected to a Raspberry Pi box. They all will be named minisatip (x.x.x.x) – x. Therefore, this approach is only suitable for a single tuner or for several tuners, supporting the same broadcast standard.
- If your connected USB tuner is a multi-standard one, then minisatip will create one frontend for each standard. For example, in the picture above, PCTV 292e supports DVB-T/T2 and DVB-C. minisatip creates two entries minisatip (192.168.0.140) – 0 for DVB-C and minisatip (192.168.0.140) – 1 for DVB-T/T2. In general, DVB-C frontend is created before DVB-T/T2 frontend.
To scan channels, press Scan button next to the minisatip tuner and follow the steps of the scanning wizard Once all your TV channels are scanned, press Apply button and you are done! You can now watch and record TV channels with TVMosaic software.
Tested tuners
We have successfully tested the following tuners to work properly in this setup:
- Technotrend 4400 (DVB-T/T2/C)
- PCTV 460e (DVB-S/S2)
- PCTV 461e (DVB-S/S2)
- Evolveo Venus DVB-T tuner (DVB-T)
- PCTV 290e (DVB-T/T2/C)
- PCTV 292e (DVB-T/T2/C)
- WinTV Nova TD (DVB-T/T2)
If you have a tuner, which is not on the list, it does not mean that it will not work! ? It just means that we have not tested it ourselves.
This is the end of the first part of the tutorial. If everything works as expected, that’s it. Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comment below.
If not or you would like to know how the micro SD image file was made and what is on it, you may proceed with the following chapters.
If not or you would like to know how the micro SD image file was made and what is on it, you may proceed with the following chapters.
Troubleshooting
![Tuner Tuner](/uploads/1/1/8/2/118218631/834401596.png)
What should you do if things do not go according to the plan? TVMosaic does not detect any minisat tuners or there are no channels found?
The first thing to do is to check if we can reach Raspberry Pi on the network (this step will also let us find its IP address). Fire up the command line and type:
The first thing to do is to check if we can reach Raspberry Pi on the network (this step will also let us find its IP address). Fire up the command line and type:
If successful, you should see output like this:
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If ping is not successful, your Raspberry Pi cannot boot up or is not connected to the network.
Further troubleshooting will require a bit of linux command line skills. Download and install Putty ssh client. Start it, enter an IP address of your raspberry into the Host name edit box and press Open. Press Yes in the dialog that comes, warning you that the system identity is not known.
Once connected, log into the system with user pi and password raspberry.
The next thing to check is if your tuner(s) were properly recognized. Type
Further troubleshooting will require a bit of linux command line skills. Download and install Putty ssh client. Start it, enter an IP address of your raspberry into the Host name edit box and press Open. Press Yes in the dialog that comes, warning you that the system identity is not known.
Once connected, log into the system with user pi and password raspberry.
The next thing to check is if your tuner(s) were properly recognized. Type
The command output should list dvb adapters:
If there are no adapters listed, your tuner is not recognized by linux. To understand why, type
and go through the output to see if there are any errors, related to the tuner initialization. The most common reason is missing firmware file(s). If that is the case, find the missing file on the Internet, copy the file url to the clipboard and type in the ssh window:
For example, here are the commands to download and install firmware file for PCTV 292e tuner:
Disconnect and reconnect your USB tuner tuner for firmware to be loaded.
Troubleshooting minisatip and getting more information on the tuners
To obtain the minisatip logging, you need to stop it running as a background service and start it in a foreground with the following commands:
From the minisatip console output, you can see which tuners have been detected, what is their type and how they have been mapped onto the sat>ip server frontends. For example, for TT4400 USB tuner you will see something like this:
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Once you finished examining minisatip log, press Control-C to exit minisatip application and then type
to resume its normal operations.
Preparing Raspberry Pi and building minisatip (Do-It-Yourself part)
This chapter describes how to manually prepare a micro SD card image to work as minisatip server. It requires time and certain linux command line skills. If your are ready for this – let’s go!
The first thing you need to do is to download and install the latest Raspbian image on your micro SD card. The instructions on how this can be done are provided at the Raspberry’s official website. I have used Raspbian Stretch Lite as we do not need Desktop’s extra for our purpose.
Insert the microSD card into raspberry, connect all cables (including USB keyboard and HDMI cable to a monitor) and power it up.
Log in with user pi and password raspberry to enable ssh:
The first thing you need to do is to download and install the latest Raspbian image on your micro SD card. The instructions on how this can be done are provided at the Raspberry’s official website. I have used Raspbian Stretch Lite as we do not need Desktop’s extra for our purpose.
Insert the microSD card into raspberry, connect all cables (including USB keyboard and HDMI cable to a monitor) and power it up.
Log in with user pi and password raspberry to enable ssh:
Download and install Putty ssh client. Start it, enter an IP address of your raspberry into the Host name edit box and press Open. Press Yes in the dialog that comes, warning you that the system identity is not known.
Once connected, log into the system with user pi and password raspberry.
Install required dependencies and tools:
Once connected, log into the system with user pi and password raspberry.
Install required dependencies and tools:
Clone and build minisatip:
Download missing firmware files for a number of tuner models and put them into /lib/firmware/ directory:
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Create a service file for minisatip to start automatically on boot:
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press Insert key to switch to insert mode and paste the following contents of the file:
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Press Escape and type :wq followed by Enter to exit editor.
Enable and start minisatip service:
Enable and start minisatip service:
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At this point it is finished. Exit ssh command line and proceed with scanning channels in TVMosaic as described above.