Odroid N2Plus and C4 with DVB tuners in usb3 ports

[teacup]

I have tested some DVB usb stick tuners with a 9.2.4.2 build of CoreELEC running on Odroid N2Plus and Odroid C4 boards - this post is to share the results.

Used following usb dvb tuners:

• Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD rev B3I6 (two tuners in single stick, supports also DVB-T2)
• Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD rev C2I6 (two tuners in single stick, supports also DVB-T2)
• AVerTV Volar Black HD (af9015 chipset, DVB-T only)

Odroid boards:

CoreELEC:~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo | tail -n 4
model name      : Amlogic S905X3 rev c
Hardware        : Hardkernel ODROID-C4
Revision        : 0400

CoreELEC:~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo | tail -n 4
model name      : Amlogic S922X rev c
Hardware        : Hardkernel ODROID-N2Plus
Revision        : 0400

First of all I am glad to share, that the usb tuners are working fine in usb3 ports of both N2Plus and C4 boards, i.e. the problem that usb dvb tuners would work only in usb2otg port as described here:

9.2.2 DVB tbs driver / Hauppauge USB wintv dual HD / Tvheadend conflict

Just received a WinTV-dualHD today and encountered the same problem with a bit older build of coreelec, running on GT-King Pro. I can confirm that after rebuild from head of coreelec-9.2 branch (9f6f71fbe4) the problem reported in this thread is fixed. However I get another problem: Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD tuner is not working in any USB 3.0 port of GT-King Pro. It works only in the one USB 2.0 port (marked as OTG) provided by GT-King Pro. When in usb 3.0 port, following messages are logged: […

is not present when testing with the above Odroid boards!
Used pvr.hts with tvheadend42 service addon to watch DVB-T/T2 tv channels in Kodi, worked fine when used “dvb latest” drivers addon with both WinTV-dualHD and VolarBlackHD tuners.

Tried to connect both WinTV-dualHD sticks simultaneously getting 4 usb dvb tuner devices allowing to watch/stream channels from four different dvb multiplexes at the same time.
Streamed 15 channels from 4 multiplexes at the same time to a linux PC using mpv as a viewer started from tvheadend’s web interface - worked great, having many HD channels there.

To stress the usb, connected also a mechanical 2.5" sata HDD over usb3 adapter and tested playback of a 1080p h264 movie (about 18mbit/s bitrate), while streaming the 15 dvb channels to PC.
Wanted to see how fast would be a file copy from the usb hdd to PC over NFS on gigabit ethernet under the load of 1080p watched movie with 15 dvb channels streamed:

• Odroid C4 real transfer speed: 93.9MB/s
• Odroid N2Plus real transfer speed: 97.0MB/s

Tested using a time command of a script that copied a 20GB file to nfs mounted directory, unmounting it after copy to avoid memory caching influence. On PC side (nfs server), the nfs share has been a 28GB ram disk (tmpfs) to avoid any slowdowns on the destination.

Just for comparison, the same file copy test without any load (i.e. without watching the 1080p h264 movie and without streaming the 15 dvb channels) allowed following speeds:

• Odroid C4 real transfer speed: 102.8MB/s
• Odroid N2Plus real transfer speed: 104.9MB/s

This shows very little impact of streaming many dvb channels together with 1080p h264 movie watching on NFS file transfer from usb3 connected HDD to the board.

There is an issue with usb dvb tuners when a board is suspended (due to TV switched off putting the board to sleep via hdmi CEC) - when the board is waken up, the tuner does not work anymore.
It is not specific to WinTV-dualHD tuners, the same behaviour is present with the AVerTV Volar Black HD tuner too.
The problem is not specific to Odroid boards, the same happens with my GT-King Pro tv box (where the tuners work only if connected to usb2otg port unforunately) - as documented here:

USB DVB Tuners and Odroid N2

I can confirm this behaviour with GT-King Pro too. Tested with CE 9.2.4.2, WinTV-dualHD runs only in usb2otg port and stops working on resume. Needs reboot or unplug/replug. But it seems not to be specific only to the Hauppauge - just tested it with AVerTV Volar Black HD tv tuner (af9015 chipset, DVB-T only) and even though it works in usb3 ports as well as in usb2otg, the problem with suspend/resume stopping to work occurs too. It helps to set “USB Power” to ON in Inject BL301 options - both…

This resume problem of usb tuners can be worked around via switching the “USB power” option to ON - this would need further investigations as it is not nice if mechanical hdd would be connected too.