I have an old four port PCI video capture card that has a book tree chip set (which I can't remember the model number off the top of my head, and it's not branded as anything). I understand that it has an inbuilt tuner for analoge TV and radio (or this can be done using software), but I can't get it to work.

The machine it's in is running linux mint Helena XFCE (which is compatable with Ubuntu Hardy Heron and even uses some of the same apt repositories). What I want to be able to do is use this to record and play back analoge PAL TV broardcasts or FreeView digital TV broadcasts. My problem is that I'm not sure what apps I should be looking at or the name of drivers I should be trying. My first problem is making the card work at all, I think the system might be just ignoring it but I don't know how to test it.

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

My roommate has an old Xpert98 ATI analog capture card with the Brooktree chipset on it, and she uses the "bttv" driver (which accepts a few options for configuration when modprobing the driver) and she uses TV-Time as the application to watch TV from the card.

I can't speak about "recording TV shows" as to my knowledge, she does not record stuff, so you'd need to look around on that angle, unless someone else can provide some help about that.

The bttv driver is part of the Linux kernel, and you can find a pretty good bunch of info about it via Google.

Sasha

Thanks GrapefruiTgirl, I'm looking into TVTime now and it looks like the bttv driver is built into the kernel. So far so good. I have been doing some research though and it looks like my particular card has a software tuner and what I've been reading sugests this can be problematic with the bttv driver.

Has anyone else here got bttv to work with software tuning, and are there any pitfalls I should be aware of?

I would like to take back my last statment. This card has *no* tuner. It is meant for streaming pre-tuned data from an AV device (such as a VCR or video camera). This means I will need to get some diferent hardware before this works.