Aldi will next week (from 10th July) be selling Medion TV cards (PCI) with the Philips 7134 chipset. From what I can ascertain, this should work fine using V4L(2?). Can someone correct me if I'm wrong, please?

Cheers.

You can get your information at
http://bytesex.org/saa7134/

I have a phillips saa 7134 based tv card and have not been succesful in having it work with mandrake 9 or 9.1 it is recognised as a a device but not as a tv tuner.
I believe the inbuilt support is for the Brooktree (BT 878 ?) tuners.
If someone has had success with the saa7134 tuners I would be interested as well.

Thanx Electro.
It appears my googleing was a little substandard

Looks like I have a job to do !

Well, it appears to be a hell of a lot cheaper than the Hauppage cards, so I am quite happy to do a bit of work! Electro, I found those drivers too, but I guess I didn't read through anything on that page - I saw the V4L thing and assumed it was saying that it was a standard part of the V4L package. Oh well. I will probably get it anyway. I'll post back on Thursday evening with details of how it went.

Always, always, always check your hardware compatibility first! It works 'out of the box' (almost) with Mandy 9.1

The saa7134 module is already a part of the kernel, so no need to download and reconfigure kernel. Modprobe saa7134 works, but not very well. So, added:
options saa7134 card=9
alias /dev/v4l saa7134
to /etc/modules.conf
Sometimes, when I start X I need to change to root and rmmod a load of modules (videodev, video-buf, v4l2-common, v4l1-compat, tuner, tda9887, saa7134, i2c-core) and then run xawtv as a normal user again to get sound, but I can live with that since it is only occasionally (usually after I rebooted with the radio still working).

Can't seem to get teletext to work, but I'm not really trying.

All in all, a good purchase - not the best card in the world, but then it was only cheap.

Hi,

Tv-Card: TerraTec Cinergy 600 (saa7134)
Kernel: 2.4.21 (patched just like recommended on www.bytesex.org)
Driver: saa7134 (manually installed without problems)
xawtv-ver: 3.74-4

In order to try the newly purchased piece of hardware I was using xawtv. Everything worked quite fine, I saw a picture. If I would like to read lips, while watching tv, I'd be set. But that is not the case. I sort of have a hard time to get xawtv going with sound.

My tv-card's audio-out is connected with the soundcard line-in. That is working fine. I installed tvtime, just to double-check. And it worked. I got pictures and sound. Unfortunately that software does not support recording, which brings me back to xawtv.

Here are the lines I inserted into my module.conf:
alias char-major-81 saa7134
options saa7134 card=11 mixer_nr=1 dsp_nr=1

On some websites I found an additional option: oss=1. When I tried this one as well, I ended up with a full stop. So I deleted it again from the module.conf.

These are the modules loaded:

Module Size Used by Tainted: P
tuner 12288 1 (autoclean)
saa7134 68928 0 (autoclean)
video-buf 15244 0 (autoclean) [saa7134]
i2c-core 17572 0 (autoclean) [tuner saa7134]
videodev 8000 3 (autoclean) [saa7134]
v4l2-common 3872 0 (autoclean) [saa7134]
v4l1-compat 12644 0 (autoclean) [saa7134]
sr_mod 17848 0 (autoclean)
emu10k1 63624 0 (autoclean)
ac97_codec 14312 0 (autoclean) [emu10k1]
soundcore 5956 4 (autoclean) [saa7134 emu10k1]
agpgart 42240 3 (autoclean)
nvidia 1670784 10 (autoclean)
scanner 11704 0 (unused)
usb-uhci 26188 0 (unused)
nls_iso8859-1 3548 1 (autoclean)
nls_cp437 5148 1 (autoclean)
vfat 12652 1 (autoclean)
fat 37624 0 (autoclean) [vfat]
nfs 79672 5 (autoclean)
lockd 58768 1 (autoclean) [nfs]
sunrpc 79196 1 (autoclean) [nfs lockd]
autofs 13300 0 (autoclean) (unused)
8139too 18600 1
mii 3732 0 [8139too]
iptable_filter 2412 0 (autoclean) (unused)
ip_tables 14328 1 [iptable_filter]
ide-scsi 12080 0
scsi_mod 104756 2 [sr_mod ide-scsi]
ide-cd 35424 0
cdrom 32576 0 [sr_mod ide-cd]
mousedev 5460 1
keybdev 2880 0 (unused)
hid 22116 0 (unused)
input 5248 0 [mousedev keybdev hid]
ehci-hcd 19816 0 (unused)
usbcore 74080 1 [scanner usb-uhci hid ehci-hcd]

This is, what I get back when throwing: xawtv -hwscan:

This is xawtv-3.74, running on Linux/i686 (2.4.21)
looking for available devices
port 137-137
type : Xvideo, image scaler
name : NV17 Video Overlay

port 138-169
type : Xvideo, image scaler
name : NV05 Video Blitter

/dev/video0: OK [ -device /dev/video0 ]
type : v4l
name : Terratec Cinergy 600 TV
flags: overlay capture tuner

Please tell me, what I have missed. I do not know any more, where to look at.

Cheers,
Johanni

OK, I still have problems with sound in Xaw occasionally - there doesn't really seem to be any consistency, but nevermind. Anyway, I find that, as root, rmmoding the following modules helps:
saa7134, video-buf, videodev, v4l1-compat, v4l2-common, tuner and then i2c-core. Exit from being root and then run xawtv again (as a normal user). Make sure that all volumes are set to an adequate level and cross fingers.

<edit>
Oh, BTW, you do have something similar to this in your /etc/modules.conf file?</edit>