After some time of easy TV viewing using my ATI TV Wonder card in linux, now I can't seem to get a picture that's correct. Whether I use zapping or xawtv, the picture shows up rolled vertically.

See this snapshot for what I mean. In this mode the color is washed out to grays and the image is slow. The zapping program also runs much slower now, taking a few seconds sometimes to open settings windows.

Anyone else seen this? If it's any help I'm viewing a USA cable network with the card and it was working fine. I was able to go fullscreen (which results in a big scrambled signal) and then back to windowed viewing, and it fixed it, but later on when reopening the TV viewer it was back to this rolled way. For the life of me I can't get it to switch back again.

Also I should note that I can view TV in Windows just fine without any problem, and that Linux was able to view TV just fine as well up until about a week or so ago. I'd rather not reboot into Windows to watch TV when I know Linux can do this.

After some more research and shooting in the dark repeatedly I managed to hit something.

Placing the following lines into my modules.conf cause the ATI TV Wonder to be viewable using the xawtv. However, zapping doesn't work, and I can't get the most recent verison of it to install in my system due to rpm and other library dependencies.

alias char-major-89 i2c-core
alias char-major-90 i2c-algo-bit
options i2c-core i2c_debug=1
options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1
options bttv card=63 tuner=2
options tuner type=2

The notable change is the card type from 10 to 63. I read the CARDLIST document in the bttv driver's directory of source code and documentation to find it at the urging of another web page I found using Google.

I'm happy to have a usable video signal back, and along the way I figured out how to get my quickcam to auto-load its driver at boot time, but I'm left with two issues.

1. How to get the tv card driver to load at boot time. It currently requires me to execute modprobe bttv as root before I can watch tv.

2. I want to find a tv app that will let me take still pictures and record video from the card so I don't have to do this in Windows any more.

Your thoughts and input are appreciated.