First of all, what is the make and model of the TV card? With that information, we could look up its specifications and find out what sound chip it uses, if in fact it does use one.
Is the TV card connected to the sound card in any way? My TV card (AIW Radeon) connects to the Line-In port of my sound card. So to adjust the volume (if my Radeon had TV-in under Linux as well as Windows, which it unfortunately does not), I would have to adjust the Line-In channel on my mixer.
If your TV card does not need to connect to the sound card in any way at all, it's a fair bet that it has its own sound chip; you might try typing
lspci in a terminal to see if its listed as part of the TV card's sub-devices.
Or, there's this, in the
dmesg posted above:
Quote:
tvaudio: found tda9850 @ 0xb6
|
.
tda9850 appears to be the audio chipset;
tvaudio appears to be the driver; seems to be part of the v4l (video 4 linux) kernel driver.
Since Xawtv (or any other TV display progam you might use) is the only program to use this device, it's not surprising that you might have to use the program itself to set the sound levels. Does Xawtv not retain its settings between uses?
However, it's quite possible that this can also be set in your mixer... have you used the right arrow key to make sure you've scrolled through all the mixer channels available to alsamixer? When you changed the mixer settings, did you reduce the PCM channel, or just the Main channel? PCM is normally the one that controls the guts of the main volume. There's also a "Video" channel, which on a system with a TV card might well control the chip in question. I've noticed that the GNOME sound mixer applet (I don't know about KDE) has
tabs to reflect the mixers for different sound devices... if you use GNOME, you might want to check and see if there's a tab for tvaudio or something similar.
Hope this helps.