watching tv in linux

Just an update, I've been using mythtv (thanks for the tip guys) and it's sweet, my only question is has anyone been able to get an ATI TV Wonder card to encode sound? It shows up on lspci as bt878 sound but when I tried to get myth to do hardware encoding it does not and mythfrontend gives a ton of audio buffer overflow errors.

I think it has something to do with enabling some options in modules.conf, but I'm not sure where.

Anybody use freevo? I haven't tried MythTV so I wanted to get some compare and contrast MythTV vs. Freevo.

Well I am still running MythTV and it is now almost to version .9. Regarding your question about the ati tv wonder, I assume you are talking about using btaudio to pull the audio from the ati tv wonder without having to pipe the sound to a sound card. This can be done only if you are using the ATI TV Wonder, not the VE kind. I have two ATI TV Wonders in my MythTV system. One of them is a VE. For the VE, I use the audio cable to connect to the line in of my SB LIve card. For the ATI TV Wonder (non VE), sound just goes through the pci bus. I don know what you meant by hardware encoding. I thought if you use the ATI TV Wonder, all encoding is in software. That is why the system requirements are pretty high. If you have a PVR 250 or 350 card, then encoding is in hardware. If you need further info, let me know.

Yea it's not the VE it's the standard tv wonder... and in winodws it does hardware encoding of video and audio in mpeg2. So I assumed it would be possible to do it in mythtv as well.

I have a little problem with XaWTV:

I have a Pinnacle PCTV card and XaWTV seems to have problems with scaling when I go in fullscreen mode. The card's resolution is 640x480, and when I have my resolution in X set to 1024x768, I have ugly black borders. XaWTV just can't scale it

Anyone knows how to fix this?

Muddy, I seem to recall reading somewhere that the ATI TV Wonder hardware MPEG is not true hardware encoding. I could be wrong. I notice that between Windows XP and Redhat Linux 9, the TV card perfomrs better with Redhat 9. My Windows XP stutters when recording even 1 show. In Linux, I can record two shows simultaneouly and watch a thired without problem. It could be a driver issue in XP. Also I dont think there is any MPEG encoder support in MythTV other than the PVR 250 and 350. As far as you trying to get audio from the ATI TV Wonder, here is the relevant part of my modules.conf


# i2c - > btaudio seems to require this
alias char-major-89 i2c-dev
options i2c-core i2c_debug=1
options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1

# ATI TV Wonder
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 bttv
pre-install bttv modprobe -k msp3400; modprobe -k tuner


# Btaudio
alias sound-slot-1 btaudio
pre-install btaudio modprobe <your sound card module here >

This assumes that you have one other sound card which is alias sound-slot-0. The pre-install under btaudio just makes sure that your sound card gets loaded before btaudio. Therefore your sound card will get /dev/dsp0 while btaudio will get /dev/dsp1, /dev/dsp2. (It takes 2 dsp devices). Check to make sure you have all these dev devices created. If not create them like this :

mknod /dev/dsp1 c 14 19
mknod /dev/dsp2 c 14 35

You should also have a mixer device for each of your sound devices. Your sound card should get /dev/mixer0. If you dont have /dev/mixer1 create it:
mknod /dev/mixer1 c 14 16

In /etc/rc.d/rc.local add :
modprobe <your sound card module>
modprobe bttv
modprobe btaudio

There should be a symlink in your /dev directory called /dev/dsp. This should be pointed to /dev/dsp0

After a reboot ,check dmesg and see if btaudio did get those dsp devices. If it did then in MythTV under the setup section for Capture devices, point your capture card to record from /dev/dsp1 (the btaudio digital output device) and you should be able to get audio from the ATI TV wonder without an audio cable (disconnect the audio cable to check). You still need your sound card for playback of the final pcm signal but you dont need to use its line in for recording audio. Also, make sure that your under the mythtv recording section for both the live tv and default (record profile), you have slected a 32000 for audio capture rate. Hope this helps.

Yea, I did get the bt878 sound chip to show up in kmix but I'm not at home to post how I did it, basically I added btaudio module to modules.conf.

As far as getting the hardware recording to work... I've not had much time to work on it. I spent the last 3 days installing mandrake 9.1 and compiling the kernel about 20x to get everything to work right.

Seppe wrote:

> I have a Pinnacle PCTV card and XaWTV seems to have problems with scaling when I go in fullscreen mode. The card's resolution is 640x480, and when I have my resolution in X set to 1024x768, I have ugly black borders. XaWTV just can't scale it


Edit ~/.xawtv. Add the following, under [global]:

fullscreen = 640 x 480


You may also need to set the v4l (that's v 4 'L' as in video4linux) module in your XF86Config file. Reference: http://www.linuxlogin.com/linux/ati_tv.php

to the best of my knowledge all tv cards based on NTSC will look bad going past 640x480, it's not you. I can't explain it very well off the top of my head, but there is alot of data out there on this. The main prob is NTSC is not designed to go past that.

It seems I get poor quality (framed dropped) if I run xawtv in fullscreen in a resolution higher than 320x240. It works fine in Win98 (I have a Kworld 878 tv tuner)... Could it be the video card? I have a sis6326 agp with 8MB ram (but the x server only sees 4mb)

Should I change the video card?

how do you have your modules.conf setup for the bttv and btaudio options?

Who? Me?
This is my modules.conf

probeall usb-interface usb-uhci
alias eth0 8139too 
alias sound-slot-0 via82cxxx_audio 
options bttv radio=1 card=78 tuner=5 gbuffers=4

have you tried it without the gbuffers ?

hmmm... no... What does gbuffers do?

I have a Philips TV tuner card , it show me the Driver as bttv. I am using RedHat9. How to make work this TV tuner card in my system?