HTPC Linux Setup with DigitalNow TinyTwin

I put together a HTPC earlier in 2013, and got a Leadtek DTV2000DS Plus TV tuner (for budgetary reasons, mainly).

Had nothing but trouble with it, and ended up getting it going sort of okay in the end, but was never really happy with its performance. The firmware would only compile with a specific kernel (3.2.0.51 as the max), so no updates could ever go in. Overall it was a nightmarish experience.

Bye-bye DTV2000DS Plus...

Yesterday I blasted away the Leadtek and the previous install, and installed a DigitalNow TinyTwin USB tuner. From a fresh install to having a running MythTV was a couple of hours, compared to months of on-and-off tinkering previously. Obviously having the experience from last time helped, but this setup was relatively painless in comparison.

Brief overview of the steps, in case anyone else is using this tuner:

• Installed fresh Mint 16 (for no particular reason, other than had it on a flash drive already).
• After plugging in the TinyTwin, it was detected as a USB device, but didn't pick up firmware automatically. lsusb gave its ID as 048d:9006.
• dmesg | grep dvb said something along the lines of "dvb-usb-it9135-01.fw missing". So I downloaded the firmware from https://github.com/OpenELEC/dvb-firmware (there is a link for the entire zip, or you could just clone the repo).
• After unzipping the zip, cd into dvb-firmware-master/it9135 and then copy firmware file:
sudo cp -p dvb-usb-it9135-01.fw /lib/firmware
• Followed up with a cold boot (not sure if needed, but some places suggested this can be different to a warm boot).
• dmesg | grep dvb now showed "successfully initialized and connected", and ls /dev/dvb showed adapter0 and adapter1. Success!
• Installed MythTV 0.27 (as per here).

After that, configuring MythTV all went by the book. Using the default over the air grabber worked as well (last time I'd tried setting up Shepherd, which I never got going properly).