# Good TV card for linux

## jay

Hi folks!

I plan to shop a TV tuner card to watch soccer on my pc during work. Can anybody recommend chipsets/brand cards that work fine with linux?

Jens

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## Nitro

I have just a regular WinTV PCI card from Hauppage.  Works great with XawTV, and the modules needed to run it our in the kernel.  My card is about 2 years old, so I don't know if you will find it anymore.

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## chadh

Any card that uses the bt848 chipset will work fine.  The Hauppauge cards are the best known, but there are really cheap capture cards that use the bt848 chipset as well.

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## rob

on the subject of tv cards I have this hardware;

this is a 3dfx tv card (hauppage) but not bt848?

00:0c.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 (rev 11)

this is the tuner(?) on my ati rage 128 (listed below)

00:0c.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 (rev 11)

this ati card apparently does tv out...

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 RF 

if anyone has had any luck getting either of these tv tuners working or tv out working with the ati rage card i would much appreciate any advice! :-)

-rob_

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## chadh

It looks to me like the bttv driver supports the bt878 as well.  Just google for your card.  If it is not supported, you will find all the details, I am sure.

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## chemical

I use a 4 month old hauppage card and it works great except for the fact that i can no longer find them with those little internal connectors that connect to your sound card.  Just watch out for cards like ATI cards where you need an ATI video card to use it

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## jay

I am thinking about this card:

http://www.typhoonline.com/anubis_english/viewproduct.asp?id=50687&catid=002

Does anybody know where I am able to check which chipsets are supported?

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## kode54

Mine is a Machspeed MachTV, (bt878) a decent tuner card from a company that no longer exists. It matches bttv's card preset #76, Canopus WinDVR PCI.

Currently, I'm using the latest bttv 0.8.x, along with bttv2. Both require the v4l2 patch against kernel 2.4.19-pre8, which also requires the videodev patch. Applying the patches was a bit of a pain, as gentoo-sources 2.4.19-r5 seem to have part of the latest videodev patch, but not all of it. I had to apply their videodev patch, then tidy up the mess it left behind. (Doubling one or two functions where parts of the patch were already applied) The v4l2 patch messed up on one Makefile, because the patch appeared to contain spaces instead of tabs for that file. Finally, after getting it all working, bttv2 registers its device as /dev/v4l2/capture# instead of /dev/v4l/video#, so I configured devfsd to symlink that to /dev/video0 and /dev/v4l/video0.

End possibly useless information.  :Razz: 

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## leej

 *rob wrote:*   

>  if anyone has had any luck getting either of these tv tuners working or tv out working with the ati rage card i would much appreciate any advice!  

 

I used to have that ATI card (ATI Rage Fury Pro 32MB AGP), but erm dumped it in favour of an NVidia card because of the lockups and general instability with Xine/Xv and GLX.  Launching Xawtv will also cause lockups on the ATI card unless you compile V4L and all associated bt848 stuff into the kernel (such as I2C, I2C Bit Banging, Philips style, I2C dev interface, bt848 and SAA5249 (if you want teletext)).

Then run it through /dev/v4l like so:

```
xawtv -c /dev/v4l
```

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## billatq

I've been trying to get my bttv card to work (incidentally, it's an ati tv-"wonder"). My issue is that I can't seem to find the menu to add on support for i2c, etc along with the v4l module for bttv in multimedia.

I'm using the 2.4.19-r1 kernel, which I thought would have it, but that does not seem to be so.

Might I need to get a different kernel source?

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## leej

 *billatq wrote:*   

> My issue is that I can't seem to find the menu to add on support for i2c, etc along with the v4l module for bttv in multimedia.

 

If you use 

```
make menuconfig
```

, the I2C submenu is under Character Devices isn't it?   :Smile: 

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## billatq

Ah, that was very helpful. But now the problem of the bttv driver..I can't seem to find that at all.

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## leej

Once you select the I2C drivers, BT848 should magically appear under the Multimedia Devices -> Video4Linux section.

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## billatq

Excellent! I had to do that all in FreeBSD before, but I forgot about adding i2c in linux and I'm not to familiar with the menuconfigure deal. Thanks.

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## billatq

Strange..after installing the modules, I can't seem to modprobe the bttv one.

```
root@192 linux # modprobe bttv

modprobe: Invalid line 104 in /etc/modules.conf

        

modprobe: Invalid line 105 in /etc/modules.conf

        Alsa
```

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## billatq

Hmm, this seems to be related to all modules, in general. When I built just the modules, I did:

```
make clean 

make modules

make modules_install
```

Does recompiling the entire kernel necessarily mean that I'm going to need to rebuild all of the extra modules, i.e. the nvidia kernel modules, the alsa kernel modules and the modules for my ddr mat?[/code]

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## leej

 *Quote:*   

> Does recompiling the entire kernel necessarily mean that I'm going to need to rebuild all of the extra modules, i.e. the nvidia kernel modules, the alsa kernel modules and the modules for my ddr mat?

 

Yes.  Anything that dumps anything in /lib/modules/2.* has to be re-emerged/built after you've recompiled the kernel.  Ideally, you should backup your existing /lib/modules/2.* directory before recompiling the kernel otherwise you might end up with unresolved symbols errors when loading particular modules afterwards.

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## billatq

Well, it is working now. Thanks for the help!

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