Sabrent SBT-TVFM 7130 TV Card
 

I am having trouble getting my Sabrent SBT-TVFM 7130 TV Card working under linux. I live in the US and use cable tv. If I use MythTV or KDETV I get a black screen. Also KDETV gives this error:
Unable to grab video.
Video display is not possible with the current plugin configuration. Try playing with the configuration options of the V4L2 plugin.

I added this line to modprobe.conf.local:

#options saa7134 card=3 tuner=17

As told in this mini howto:linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Sabrent_SBT-TVFM


This is part of my current dmesg:

saa7130[0]: found at 0000:04:06.0, rev: 1, irq: 11, latency: 32, mmio: 0xfdbff000
saa7130[0]: subsystem: 1131:0000, board: Sabrent SBT-TVFM (saa7130) [card=42,autodetected]
saa7130[0]: board init: gpio is 38500
saa7130[0]: Huh, no eeprom present (err=-5)?
: chip found @ 0xc2 (saa7130[0])saa7130[0]: found at 0000:04:06.0, rev: 1, irq: 11, latency: 32, mmio: 0xfdbff000
saa7130[0]: subsystem: 1131:0000, board: Sabrent SBT-TVFM (saa7130) [card=42,autodetected]
saa7130[0]: board init: gpio is 38500
saa7130[0]: Huh, no eeprom present (err=-5)?
: chip found @ 0xc2 (saa7130[0])
tuner 0-0061: type set to 17 (Philips NTSC_M (MK2))
: chip found @ 0xc6 (saa7130[0])
saa7130[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
saa7130[0]: registered device vbi0
saa7130[0]: registered device radio0

I don't know if any of this is correct especially the card=3 tuner=17 because the card is autodetected as 42 and it told me to put the lines in modules.config and i have no such file. I put them in modprobe.conf.

I have suse 10 with a 2.6.13 kernel.

I just got the same card yesterday. I operate on a Gentoo 2.6.15-r7 kernel.
I have my troubles getting it to work, too. However, I am successful in getting a composite signal displayed.
It is wierd that your card is being autodetected despite its lack of EEPROM. Mine is certainly not autodetected and I have been passing the card=42 option with limited success
The module mixes up the composite and television signals so I can watch the composite input, but I can only see static on the tv input because I can't tune it when the module thinks the cable input is a composite signal.

If I run kdetv, and pull down the video menu, I have two choices at the bottom of "video4linux2" and "video4linux." If I choose the "video4linux" option, I can reproduce your error message. For the other one it is the same thing as with tvtime.

I will try various card= options and see if I can get one that works

What tuner number are you using?

I didn't actually set it to a specific number. I tried all 69 tuner numbers and it got me nowhere. They all worked almost exactly the same.

Here is the shell script that I used that sped up that process:

#/bin/sh
MAXTUNER=69
i=0
while [ $i -lt $MAXTUNER ];
do
rmmod tuner saa7134
modprobe saa7134 card=42 tuner=$i
echo "Actual tuner is:" $i
sleep 1 # this is to make sure /dev/video is registered when tvtime starts
tvtime
i=$(($i+1))
done

unfortunately it didn't help things for me so I will use it to go through the card options

Nothing but static. Tell me how far you get so I can judge if I have a bad card or connection or not.

I tried a dvd player to try with composite input and I get green static as opposed to a black screen. When I run the script I get this output for every tuner:

Actual tuner is: 68
Running tvtime 0.99.
Reading configuration from /etc/tvtime/tvtime.xml
Reading configuration from /root/.tvtime/tvtime.xml
xvoutput: No XVIDEO port found which supports YUY2 images.

*** tvtime requires hardware YUY2 overlay support from your video card
*** driver. If you are using an older NVIDIA card (TNT2), then
*** this capability is only available with their binary drivers.
*** For some ATI cards, this feature may be found in the experimental
*** GATOS drivers: http://gatos.souceforge.net/
*** If unsure, please check with your distribution to see if your
*** X driver supports hardware overlay surfaces.

I have a modern nvidia card so I don't understand this.

I installed the nvidia drivers but SUSE is still using the vesa drivers.

You're diving into the wonderful world of video cards. If you have installed the drivers, you need to configure xorg.conf to use that driver instead of vesa. Video hardware accelleration is a big confusing mess. Lucky for you, you have an NVidia. I cannot help you with this issue and it is kind of off-topic.

Any luck yet?

I had sucess with tuner 62

The 2 inputs also seem to be mixed on my card. I can get TV on Composite1 but i can't change the channel and there is no sound. Does anyone know how to g fix this?

Just a noob's guess, but it might be possible just by rearranging some digits in this portion of code from saa7134-cards.c:

[SAA7134_BOARD_SABRENT_SBTTVFM] = {
/* Michael Rodriguez-Torrent <mrtorrent@asu.edu> */
.name = "Sabrent SBT-TVFM (saa7130)",
.audio_clock = 0x00187de7,
.tuner_type = TUNER_PHILIPS_NTSC_M,
.radio_type = UNSET,
.tuner_addr = ADDR_UNSET,
.radio_addr = ADDR_UNSET,
.inputs = {{
.name = name_comp1,
.vmux = 1,
.amux = LINE1,
},{
.name = name_tv,
.vmux = 3,
.amux = LINE2,
.tv = 1,
},{
.name = name_svideo,
.vmux = 8,
.amux = LINE1,
}},
.radio = {
.name = name_radio,
.amux = LINE2,
},
},

Changing this might provide a solution, but it would much more likely trash your kernel. Backup this file, and make another bootable backup kernel before messing with this. I certainly have not tried this, and I am a little scared to.

Well, that seemed to work to an extent. Changing the .vmux variables of the composite and tv seemed to clear up the changeup, but I still get nothing but static on all channels. I hope this works for you.
Right now, my priority is video. Once I get that working, I will try to get the audio as well.