LinuxQuestions.org - capture card issues

hello everyone,

I bought a tv card with the hopes that I could put some home movies from my camcorder onto dvd. I don't card much about the TV part as I have a tv.

I'm using TVtime and the feed from my camera is clear as a bell. When I try to record using mencoder, however, I get only black and white at best. I know I've cycled through all the norms and am pretty sure I've cycled through all the normids.

I run Zenwalk on a Toshiba Satellite 1800 series with a 800mhz Pentium 3,512MB of RAM and a Trident Cyberblade with 8MB or ram. The card, according to my dmesg, is a saa7134 and runs on V4L2:

saa7134[0]: found at 0000:02:00.0, rev: 1, irq: 11, latency: 0, mmio: 0x32000000PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:02:00.0 to 64
saa7134[0]: subsystem: 1131:2004, board: Philips EUROPA V3 reference design [card=69,autodetected]
saa7134[0]: board init: gpio is 40000
usb 1-1.4: OV7630 image sensor detected
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 00: 31 11 04 20 54 20 1c 00 43 43 a9 1c 55 d2 b2 92
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 10: 00 ff 86 0f ff 20 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 20: 01 40 01 02 02 00 01 03 08 ff 00 b0 ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 30: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 40: ff 22 00 c2 96 ff 02 30 15 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 50: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 60: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 70: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
tuner 0-004b: chip found @ 0x96 (saa7134[0])
saa7134[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
saa7134[0]: registered device vbi0

Regarding my newb status: I've been working with Zenwalk exclusively for about 6 months and am REAL new to video stuff in general so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks