Hello everyone,

I am very new to the Linux world and new to this board as well. I looked around and saw a lot of neat things posted, so I thought I would ask my question here.

I am currently having trouble with a TV tuner card in my Linux computer. It is an older computer that I got from a friend and it came with a TV tuner card and is running Ubuntu 8.04. (The card is an ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 2X). TV signal worked on the computer when I first got it, however I recently changed to Xubuntu and now I am getting no signal on the card, both from cable input as well as the Video input.

I am pretty sure it used gatos before to watch TV, but now I can't find it on the machine (again, I am new to linux so it may be there, I just don't know where). The program I most recently used to try to watch TV or my video input was tvtime.

Are there any suggestions on what could be wrong and waht I can do to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have been stumped on this for quite a while now.

Thanks,
Tim

tmm786, is V4L enabled on the machine?

Not sure, how can I tell and how would I enable it?

(Again, I am very new to Linux)

Hi,
From terminal prompt, try to run "dmesg". Look for any messages regarding the TV card there. If the driver gets loaded and the card is recognised, it should have a message there.

In terms of software to watch TV, you could try Kaffeine from KDE or the latest Totem version from Gnome. Xine is also a good alternative. Never heard of gatos.

Mons

Still not having any luck with getting this to work. I tried everything mentioned above and nothing has changed. Any other ideas? Could something no longer be compatible after switching to Xubuntu? Everything else on the video card seems to be working ok, just no Cable input...

We have a machine here with a very similar or maybe identical ATI card and TV Tuner.
The tuner card works under Linux with the bttv driver (the card says it has a 'BrookTree' chipset on it), and for software, I think it's using 'TV Time'. It took a tiny bit of fiddling, but now it works quite well.

In a console, (either as root or with sudo) type lsmod and see if the bttv modules are in the list. if not, either modprobe bttv or search /lib/modules/kernel/... on your system to see if they exist.
If they don't, and you need them, you'll hafta rebuild the kernel or install another one, with the V4L support and necessary modules for the card..

If the card does NOT need, bttv, or if it does but something else is the problem, type lspci -vv and see exactly what your tuner card is called in that list (and if maybe it does have a driver associated with it), and turn to Google for some advice, then come back and tell us what you find.

tmm786 -

You're absolutely correct in your recollection that you might have used "gatos" in the past:

http://gatos.sourceforge.net/

Going forward, however, you might want to try different options.

I'm surprised about the "bttv" driver (I'm familiar with Brooktree: but as a video framegrabber - not as an ATI-compatible TV device. But why not?). So by all means - please try it, and let us know how it works!

Here are a couple of other links that might help:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to..._graphic_cards
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/linux_8.8.25.html

'Hope that helps .. PSM

Still not seeming to make any progress on this issue. I check the "bttv" issue, and it doesnt seem to be showing up. Will a different kernel help my issues? If so, I definitely do not know how to go about changing it. I also tried looking at the link posted above, but had trouble understanding and following.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to..._graphic_cards

There must be some small file or setting that is just off, since the video card works fine, it just isn't taking the cable signal in, or it just isn't displaying it on the screen. It also won't let me change the input source (ie. to the Composite In cables) within TV time.