CXD28xx Linux DVB Driver

Out-of-tree Linux kernel driver for the Sony CXD28xx series demodulator and associated tuners, supporting a wide range of broadcast standards.

Supported Hardware

Device	USB Bridge	Demod	Tuner	Frontends
Zenview(GTMEDIA) HDTV Mate	ITE IT930x	CXD2878	Ascot3 (internal)	1 (terr/cable)
TurboSight TBS 5530	Cypress FX2	CXD2878 + M88RS6060	Ascot3 + M88RS6060	2 (terr/cable + sat)

Both devices support ATSC 3.0 with the ALP network interface.

Zenview HDTV Mate has a Microchip ATECC608 secure element accessible through I2C address 0xc8.

Modules

Module	Description
alp.ko	ATSC A/330 ALP protocol — generic ALP packet parser with segmentation/concatenation reassembly and IPv4 delivery via raw-ip net device (alp%d)
cxd2878.ko	Sony CXD2878/CXD6801/CXD6802 demodulator + Ascot3/FREIA tuner driver, includes ALP-div-TS decapsulation for ATSC 3.0
m88rs6060.ko	Montage M88RS6060 satellite demod/tuner driver
it930x.ko	ITE IT930x USB bridge driver
tbs5530.ko	TurboSight TBS 5530 USB bridge driver

Installation (package)

Pre-built DKMS packages are available on the GitHub Releases page.

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo dpkg -i cxd28xx-dkms_*.deb

To remove:

sudo dpkg -r cxd28xx-dkms

Fedora / RHEL

sudo dnf install cxd28xx-dkms-*.rpm

To remove:

sudo dnf remove cxd28xx-dkms

Installation (DKMS, from source)

DKMS automatically rebuilds the driver on kernel updates.

sudo dkms add /path/to/cxd28xx
sudo dkms build cxd28xx/1.0
sudo dkms install cxd28xx/1.0

To remove:

sudo dkms remove cxd28xx/1.0 --all

Building (manual)

Requires kernel headers for the running kernel.

make
sudo make install
sudo depmod -a

To remove:

sudo make uninstall

To build against a specific kernel:

make KDIR=/path/to/kernel/build

Firmware

The following firmware files are required and should be placed in /lib/firmware/:

Device	Firmware
Zenview HDTV Mate	dvb-usb-hdtvmate.fw
TBS 5530	dvb-usb-id5530.fw

For Zenview HDTV Mate, obtain liba3_phy_sony.so by downloading the vendor's Android application and extracting the APK. Then use utils/extract_firmware_hdtvmate.c to extract the firmware blob from the library. Alternatively, dvb-usb-it9303-01.fw from the linux-firmware package can be used, but it has slightly worse performance on ATSC 3.0.

For TBS 5530, see tbsdtv/linux_media/wiki.

ATSC 3.0

Tuning

Use the included atsc3-zap utility to tune ATSC 3.0 channels:

# Build the zapper
cc -o atsc3-zap utils/atsc3-zap.c

# Tune (frequency in Hz, optional PLP selection)
./atsc3-zap 701000000 --plp 0

ALP Network Interface

ATSC 3.0 delivers IP data via the ALP (ATSC Link-layer Protocol). The driver creates a network interface alp0 (or alp1, etc.) for each adapter at device init.

The alp.ko module implements the A/330 ALP protocol:

• Parses ALP single packets, segmented packets (A/330 §5.1.2.2), concatenated packets (A/330 §5.1.2.3), and header extensions (HM=1)
• Delivers IPv4 payloads to the kernel network stack via netif_rx
• Protocol-level statistics via ethtool -S alp0

Bridge drivers expose additional TS-level statistics (e.g. TEI count, reassembly errors) via sysfs under the USB device.

The ALP-div-TS decapsulation (CXD2878-specific 3-byte TS header format) is handled inside cxd2878.ko and feeds complete ALP packets to the generic alp.ko module.

Example: South Korea ATSC 3.0

# 1. Bring up the ALP interface and assign an IP address BEFORE tuning
sudo ip link set alp0 up
sudo ip addr add 192.168.0.100/24 dev alp0

# 2. Tune to ATSC 3.0 (701 MHz, PLP 0 for non-scrambled MMT stream)
./atsc3-zap 701000000 --plp 0

# 3. Verify multicast traffic is flowing
tcpdump -i alp0

Important notes:

• It is recommended to configure the interface and IP address before tuning to avoid missing initial packets. atsc3-zap does not bring up the interface.
• A random IP address must be assigned to the interface for multicast reception to work.
• PLP 0 provides non-scrambled MMT stream in South Korea.
• Standard tools like ffplay cannot play MMT streams directly. An MMT demuxer is required.

License

GPL-2.0-only. See LICENSE for details.