ATI TV Wonder and SuSE 9.2 --- Holding Setting
 

I have an older ATI TV Wonder card from another computer that I'm trying to use with my SuSE 9.2 box. I know the card is good and I'm not a total Linux newbie, but this is posing me some trouble. I installed the card in the machine before doing a clean install of 9.2. It went though setup merrily as it should, and got to hardware detection. YaST detected the card and installed drivers and modules for it, and all seemed well. I went into KDE shortly thereafter to test out the card, and to my disappointment, it failed to work. First, XAWTV seized the system forcing me to do a reboot (I think, however, that this may be another ghost in the machine since it also happened when working on my sound card). When I got another app, XAWTV4, to work in KDE, the picture was off. I was able to channel surf a little, but I found that all of the channels were slightly off tuned, almost to a whole channel below where it should be. In other words, 62 is Comedy Central in my town, but was tuning to a black and white version of channel 61, so it wasn't all the way off, but certainly not the right channel. I was able to get into the settings in the YaST TV Card module, and even change it to NTSC us-cable, but this only provided closer reception (the right channel but still black and white) and the settings were changed back when i rebooted, or at least re-defaulted when I relaunched the TV Card module of YaST. The ultimate goal for this machine is a MythTV install, but until I get the card to work on its own, its all moot.

So, does anyone have any advice or war stories about how to make the ATI TV Wonder work? Should I just invest in a new card? I really need a working solution, but I hate to use another card when I have one working. Thanks in advance.

//eddieroger

My answer could have been this short: sell the card to a window$ user and buy a Nvidia one!
Ati's drivers are the worst ever! On some post I read about a GeForce 2 having more fps than an 9800!

Anyway, I have a 9700 pro all-in-wonder.
At first: there is still no 64 bit driver support up till today! Plain sucking 32-bit only.
Then the drivers (on the ati website) are officialy only for Xfree 4.3! (sigh)
Only on that I got a working dualhead config, but I got some mtrr errors.
From Suse 9.1 there is Xfree 4.3.99 (But RC 4.4 ore something).
Anyway, when using dual head the second screen is blurred.

For Xorg 6.7: can be made operative with some fiddling. do a google.
Xorg 6.8 No succes reported I believe. Just a no go.
So if you install Suse 9.2 and want 3D support, you have to at least downgrade to xorg 6.7 (from suse ftp).
That's what I did for my laptop.

The tuner can be gotten to work with the GATOS project. http://gatos.sourceforge.net/

Since (read from mythtv doc I believe) the implementation is not completely covering the v4l API it won't work with mythtv anyway.
I'd be happy to read if you succeed, if you try.

I just put my 9700 pro in my server, put in the good old GeForce Ti 4600 and at least drivers work like a charm.
I put in a Medion TV-card from Aldi which has the saa7134 chip. A modprobe saa7134 on Suse 9.2 made it work perfectly.

Currently trying to find a good way to put on Mythtv.

Will try to post if succesfull

good luck!

I've been attempting to do the same thing with SuSE 9.2 and MythTV. I have an old PCI ATI TV Wonder as well and can't seem to get it properly tuned outside of kdetv (which allows manual, per-channel frequency shifting, perhaps this can be done with MythTV?).

Well we finally got 64-bit drivers and xorg 6.8 support.
I found that out when installing gentoo on my machine, finding out that xfree 4.3 is no longer in portage.
It handles dual head fine when fiddling with the fglrxconfig (think it still uses old fontpaths, but I read no docs, so correct me if I'm wrong :)).

I tried to get Mythtv working but it still won't work, because something's wrong with the mysql user crap.
Something about a password I guess really annoying.

I will keep on trying till I fail or pass and will post after.

If it works I'll put Suse 9.2 on to get rid of gentoo's little annoyences I'm having.

When that works I might put together some howto, since I did not find a decent out there
(correct me if I'm wrong) :)

BTW, I am using an Hauppage TV card with BT848 chip now :)

That's nice, but it still doesn't help me.

What is your actual question?
If it is if MythTV supports the Ati onboard tuner, the docs say no, as stated in my previous post.
Just keeping the post alive and hope to get a succes story here

The original question in the very first post. How do you get SuSE to properly tune the tv wonder? I'm not talking about a all-in-wonder card, I'm talking about the ATI TV Wonder PCI. It's an idependent tv tuner card, and it is supported by SuSE and MythTV. There's just one problem... the tuning is off. Especially in the lower channels where a few are completely out of order. In kdetv, you can manually edit each channel and shift the frequency of that channel up or down as much as needed to get the right channel. However that only works in kdetv. I can't seem to find a way to get SuSE to properly set it in the first place, and MythTV seems to have no manual frequency shifting like kdetv does.

I think I finally got this thing working. Turns out the fault is in YAST. I had to go into the expert settings and manually set the card type to 63 (which correstponds to the ATI TV Wonder in the bttv CARDLIST) and tuner type 2 (Phillips NTSC). After that everything is right on the freqency it should be.

--edit--

Next problem... how do I get /dev/dsp to work? I found an old thread here about it, tried everything there but nothing worked. I cannot for the life of me get it to digitize audio to /dev/dsp. Oh yeah, I have an Audigy Gamer sound card.