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Compro VideoMata U2800F DVB-T Receiver Tested In Belgium

Others/Miscelleneous by geoffrey @ 2009-05-07

Classic analog antenna broadcastings are soon to disappear all around the world and in most cases being replaced by a digital version, in some occasions you might even run into full high definition video broadcastings. Great news for wireless receivers out there, DVB-T is an excellent way to watch quality video wherever you want, but is it really? We tested a Compro VideoMate Vista U2800F USB DVB-T receiver on Belgian grounds and the outcome is not always what you would have wished for... read on!

DVB-T video and audio quality

Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting in Belgium: video quality

Regarding video quality we're using the European PAL standard: 720x576 resolution at 25 frames per second. The audio comes at a 128kBit/s bitrate with a 48kHz: MPEG1 L2. Underneath is a screen capture of the Belgian DVB-T signal viewed full screen on my Aspire 5630 laptop, screen reso: 1280x800.

click on the image to enlarge

I've also recorded a video, unfortunately YouTube doesn't support Digital TV, this video has a resolution of 480x295 only, at 720x576 you get a much cleaner and finer image.

DVB-T versus Composite video quality

Since I have a Digital Satellite receiver at home I was able to compare both DVB-T and DVB-S signals to each other. Our television is however still an analog device and you can't spot any differences between the two. The DVB-S receiver does come with a composite video/audio output and via the video capturing input on the VideoMate U2800F I could compare how DVB-T compares to the composite/s-video signal quality

click on the image to enlarge

The above picture shows DVB-T broadcasting, underneath you can see Composite video quality. Even in a scaled down version you can already spot the difference in sharpness between the two, DVB-T is a lot sharper. Feel free to explore both in full dekstop size, DVB-T wins it easily.

DVB-T radio versus FM radio video quality

Here is recording I made with ComproFM, text was later on added with Windows Movie Maker so that I was able to upload my results to YouTube:

I also made a recording of one of the radio channels available via DVB-T, here is the result:

Even though there is some encoding involved you can clearly hear the difference between FM radio and DVB-T radio. Analog antenna broadcasting sounds a lot more poor then the digital sound I get when listening DVB-T audio.

Comment from geoffrey @ 2010/12/03

It's been a while since this article is launched and I've been using this thing for a while now. I must say it's pretty handy to have one of these, though the software bugs are still there and are sometimes annoying cause they can ruin your recordings.

This said, I was looking for Linux support but unfortunately there non such, Compro simply hasn't got any drivers for it. I ended up opening the device to have a look at the internals and it seems Compro is using a Trident TV Master TM6010 video decoder. On linux.org I found the following info:

Quote:

There were some efforts on developing a driver for tm5600/tm6000/tm6010 chips.
Michel Ludwig (michel.ludwig gmail.com) did some development mostly focused at DVB-T of tm6000. Mauro Carvalho Chehab did some development moslty focused at analog support, and extended support for tm6010.
There are some versions of the driver at http://linuxtv.org/~hg that merged both developments.
The driver is still at the TODO list, however its development is currently frosen. Mauro intends to return back to it, but this is not on his current top priorities.
Those chips are very buggy and they behave badly if the driver doesn't do exactly the same thing as the original one (it starts to loose frames). The reason is unknown, but it is suspected that there is a firmware or hardware bug at those chips.
Maybe the conversion of the driver to the new i2c approach could help to fix this issue, since this will avoid sending probing packets at i2c bus, as it is known that some i2c probe sequences can hang those chips.
Also, on all tests we've done so far, it can't reliably read data from an i2c device. This prevents that tools like scan work, since you can't be sure if a signal lock happened. Also, driver can't even be sure if xc3028 firmware were successfully loaded on this device.
It is important to notice that the vendor (Trident) doesn't seem to want helping with open source development. Contacts with the vendor were tried during 2007 and 2008 in order to get their help by opening docs, via Linux Foundation NDA program, without success.
The vendor also seems to be refusing so far to help the development of a driver for their demod DRX-K line that they acquired from Micronas (as pointed at http://linux.terratec.de/tv_en.html).
In brief, while we want to fix the driver issues, it is recommend to avoid buying any devices with tm5600/tm6000/tm6010 (and DRX demod) chips.

source: http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Tr..._based_Devices

It seems that these random crashes could be caused by a firmware runtime error, although I can not confirm this and neither did Compro at the time I asked them about it. I'd say better be warned...

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