I have just bought a cheap DVR card (ie. no manufacturer's name or model).
I'm running Debian 2.6.16, and I'm getting only grey screens in xawtv! Unfortunately it's not even the sort of grey wobbly screen which suggests that changing from PAL to NTSC etc might solve the problem!!

lspci gives:

01:0c.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
01:0d.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
01:0e.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
01:0f.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7130 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 01)
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2)

...so I have enabled kernel module saa7134. In dmesg I get:

saa7134: <rant>
saa7134: Congratulations! Your TV card vendor saved a few
saa7134: cents for a eeprom, thus your pci board has no
saa7134: subsystem ID and I can't identify it automatically
saa7134: </rant>
saa7134: I feel better now. Ok, here are the good news:
saa7134: You can use the card=<nr> insmod option to specify
saa7134: which board do you have. The list:
saa7134: card=0 -> UNKNOWN/GENERIC
*** list of cards deleted for sanity's sake ***
saa7134: card=94 -> LifeView FlyDVB-T Hybrid Cardbus 5168:3306 5168:3502
saa7130[0]: subsystem: 1131:0000, board: UNKNOWN/GENERIC [card=0,autodetected]
saa7130[0]: board init: gpio is 10000
saa7130[0]: Huh, no eeprom present (err=-5)?
saa7130[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
saa7130[0]: registered device vbi0

This then repeats for each of the 4 video inputs which end up registered as /dev/video0 to /dev/video3

xawtv -device /dev/video0-4 produces grey screens on the default input.

I have tried booting the system with a Windows hard drive, and can get the card working ok, so it must be something to do with the drivers!

I have tried:
modprobe saa7134 card=x (with x 1 - 95)
to change settings, but no obvious luck. After giving this command, do I need to restart anything, or should the changes be passed to the module automatically?

Also, assuming I find a card description that works, how do I get Debian to set the card=x at boot time - there is no /etc/modprobe.conf in Debian! Also how can I check what card number the module is currently set to if I have changed it? The output of dmesg only tells me what it was set to at boot time?


Any help appreciated.

Oz.

Ugh, cheap hardware and Linux don't really mix. But after you try with a modprobe, you will need to remove the module. So they cycle would be modprobe rmmod saa7134; saa7134 card=x; do-what-ever-to-test; rinse-lather-repeat-95-times.

To make the change permanent, you could add a line to /etc/rc.local (if it doesn't exist, create that file). Make sure it's executable.