I've spent countless hours reading and trying to figure this out on top of having to do two reinstalls of O/S after screwing up installation source cd's in urpmi. Using Mandrake 9.1, xawtv, Hauppauge WinTV Go card, can watch tv, snap jpegs that show up in my home directory, but the record on xawtv doesn't seem to do anything. If there is anyone using this set up and can help walk me through proper setup I would be grateful.

Forget recording with xawtv. Try avicap instead; it comes part of the avifile package. Download the rpm for avifile from rpmfind.net

avicap is easy to set up, and can record directly with a variety of codecs including XViD and DivX. I use it to record from VHS.

Thanks for the tip Spurious. Tonight has been an experience. Broke my system again, got it mostly reinstalled and set up now. Since last week when I decided to try recording with my tv tuner card, I've had to do 6 reinstalls of Mandrake! Never worked till this install. The only difference is I am using KDE window manager instead of Gnome. Does Gnome not work well with tv tuner cards? Also tonight I found that Knoppix is really neat, I loaded it up to use it to rescue a couple of files by burning them onto a cdr from my then unbootable system. I suppose if I used common sense I would have saved the time it took to find out that if all you have is a burner, no cdrom, then the Knoppix disk resides in the burner and cannot be released to insert a cdr to burn....hmph.