tvtime and ATI TV Wonder VE NTSC

[don999]

Hi all,

I finally got the idea to try to get my ATI TV Wonder VE NTSC card working under knoppix 6.7. The card is detected by knoppix, but it misdetects the tuner type. According to dmesg, the TV Wonder VE is PCI 1002:0003 and uses the bttv driver, finding card=64 but uses tuner=17 which is some (Temic PAL* auto (4006 FN5)) which isn't right.

Looking on the card itself, it uses a FI1236 MK2/PH which is Phillips 1236 so I entered these commands from a terminal:

sudo rmmod bttv
sudo modprobe bttv card=64 tuner=2

then launching tvtime from the knoppix menus, it comes up briefly and then quits immediately.

so from a terminal I typed:

tvtime

and it gave a bunch of messages saying that it " Cannot allocate enough off-screen video memory. This may be fixed by... increasing the amount of video memory in your x config file (for example if you are using the i810 driver)...or.Lowering the input width of tvtime with the --inputwidth parameter"

I tried adding VideoRam 32768 to the xorg.conf but it didn't make any difference. (I'm running an i810 chipset) (I got it working without changing the i810 knoppix autodetected xorg.conf)

So I typed:

tvtime --inputwidth=512

and lo a behold tvtime window came up and stayed up. Once you run tvtime successfully it creates some resource files in your home directory and you don't need the --inputwidth parameter.

Then I had to do some fiddling in the menus to get the Tuner to work:

For one thing, tvtime seems to default to PAL but since I'm in the US I I had to set the tv standard to NTSC:

menu Input Configuration/Television standard/NTSC and select restart with new settings on the menu

then had to go to Channel Management/Change frequency table/Cable with channels over 100
or use Change frequency table/Broadcast

and it works!!!! Yay!!!!!

Don

[don999]

my favorite hardware is hardware that knoppix autodetects and "just works." I've found that hauppage wintv 878 based cards autodetect and work perfectly. Anything more than just a vanilla 878 and it doesn't work. Such as a hauppage wintv pvr-350 with hardware encode/decode. I think that I could get it to work under linux, but I really want something that knoppix autodetects and I don't have to mess around downloading firmware, etc.

Hauppage cards in general seem to have good linux support.

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/faq/support_faq_linux.html

I've found that hauppage WinTV cards with bt878, AverTV Stereo (conexant fusion 878 ) , and pinnacle (conexant fusion 878 ) work without problem.

I can still get analog cable TV so I'm happy with these old analog tuners. (at least until comcast decides to stop the analog broadcasts...)