A few days ago I bought one of these for $46 from MSY. It is cheap and versatile and works very well. One reason I bought the U3100 is that it was designed with the ASUS eee PC in mind which runs on Ubuntu Linux. On my project to-do list is to build a MythTV box using Ubuntu so this USB TV tuner should work fine. In the meantime I plugged it in to my main home PC which runs WinXP.

An issue I had was the choice of TV software. I’d read that the supplied EZVCR software was no good so I was glad to see that it also came with TotalMedia 3.5. This installed, detected the TV tuner and found all the expected TV stations without a problem. The only hitch I discovered later relates to playing recorded programmes. It produces unusual mpg files which play fine in TotalMedia but when I play them with VLC or WMP there is no sound. In fact VLC says the file contains no audio stream at all, so the lack of sound is not surprising. The TotalMedia version supplied is free and probably nobbled. The TotalMedia website encourages users to upgrade to the full version for US$30. I don’t think so.

So, what free software to use instead? Mr Google recommended GB-PVR so I gave it a try. It is very good but a bit tricky to set up. A hurdle is that during configuration the ASUS U3000 is listed as supported but not the U3100. Selecting U3000 didn’t work. The GB-PVR wiki has a procedure for adding an unsupported tuner or ‘capture card’ which involves using graphedit to examine the tuner characteristics and adding these details to bda.ini, the config file for digital tuners which use BDA drivers. Before going to the trouble of downloading and installing graphedit I thought I’d try a simpler method first.

I opened bda.ini, found the section for U3000 and copied it, creating a duplicate entry. Then I changed the occurrences in the new entry of U3000 to U3100. I figured that the parameters for U3000 and U3100 would be very similar if not identical and GB-PVR might be happy if it could just find a usable entry for the U3100. Bingo, it worked.

…
[Asus u3100 mini USB]
TUNING_TYPE=DVB-T
FILTER_TUNER=ASUS U3100 Mini BDA Digital Tuner (Dev1 Path0)
FILTER_CAPTURE=ASUS U3100 Mini BDA Digital Capture (Dev1 Path0)
PIN_TUNER_IN=Input 0
PIN_TUNER_OUT=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_IN=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_OUT=MPEG2 Transport
…