What apps are there under Linux (any distro) for the ATI TV Wonder VE card?
 

I have 2 separate systems both of which have ATI TV Wonder VE cards. These things work great (despite being handicapped with mono sound) under Windows 98 and XP (btw, XP was a gift to me and I would NEVER actually intentionally purchase it!). I tried installing several different distro's of Linux on seperate cold-swapable hard drives and only found 2 apps prepackaged that even slightly worked right. It's been a while and I seem to recall that those apps came with Red Hat and/or Mandrake. When either app is run you would always get a fuzzy B&W picture it insisted was "tunned in," but you had to always fine tune it (much like an analog radio) to get a clear color picture (and I won't even go into the sound problems). The weird thing is that no matter how much you played with either of these Linux apps (and I'm sorry I can't recall their names) you could never tune in ALL of the TV-stations (nor store "channel" settings when you actually got some of the stations to tune in)! And it makes no difference if it's tuning in on a standard cable system or from an antenna over the air (btw, this is NOT a problem under Windows and the standard ATI application for Windows). So far nothing I've found in the Linux community will work with these very popular cards (not that I know what I'm doing all too well being that I'm still relatively a newbie to Linux) and ATI says they don't support Linux drivers nor applications for the TV Wonder VE TV card. Does anyone know of anything that will work similar to the Windows app? I really didn't like the expensive Hauppaugue alternatives and Pinnacle didn't seem to want to ship working cards (the last three times I tried one) if those are suggestions, but what else can I do but continue to worship ol' benevolent "Bill" (NOT!) with piles of green offerings (money) and continue to pray that today isn't the day my Windows gets broken so I can use my ATI TV app? I really want a Linux alternative and I hope someone here knows something I can use instead.

Summary: What application is there for any Linux distro (preferably Slackware or Mandrake) that will allow me to use my ATI TV Wonder VE television tuner card similar to the ATI application that is shipped for Windows?

I am not sure if your card is supported or not. However there are a few tv tuner type apps. Xawtv, Freevo and mythTV. I have not used any of them but they may lead you to what you are looking for.

I can confirm that the TV Wonder VE works great with xawtv in Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE. As for DVR software, I have no idea, but really wish I did. I'm still trying to make Freevo work, but it has millions of dependencies with Mandrake, my distro of choice.