Hey!

I'm quite a newbie in the linux world I have to say at first. Well, I'm trying to get my tv-card working under Arch Linux. But I have no idea what to do, where to read or even where to start. The card I have is a Pinnacle pctv stereo with the chipset saa7134.

Really need help with this...

lspci:
00:0c.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7134 (rev 01)

uname -r:
2.6.9-ARCH

should just be a case of running "modprobe saa7134" and then loading a viewer program, e.g. xawtv or tv-time. you might also need to load v4l2, via "modprobe v4l2". i'm not familiar with arch's module setup though, so couldn't say where to place them permanently if that works

The modprobe saa7134 works just fine, I think. The modprobe v4l2 or v4l get me module not found!?

there's a chance it might be in your kernel already so not needed. just try watchign tv now.

Tried it already. Tvtime get's me "no signal" so I think the card isn't installed/configured properly. It's not broken though it works fine in windows xp.

tvtime suck. what about xawtv? make sure you set the right frequency tables etc.... when you load saa7134, what does "dmesg" say about how it's loaded?

Okay, I downloaded xawtv and tried it out. All I get is a blue screen...?

And about the dmesg:

Linux video capture interface: v1.00
saa7130/34: v4l2 driver version 0.2.12 loaded
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:0c.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
saa7134[0]: found at 0000:00:0c.0, rev: 1, irq: 16, latency: 32, mmio: 0xe6016000
saa7134[0]: subsystem: 11bd:002b, board: Pinnacle PCTV Stereo (saa7134) [card=26,autodetected]
saa7134[0]: board init: gpio is 0
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 00: bd 11 2b 00 f8 f8 1c 00 43 43 a9 1c 55 d2 b2 92
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 10: 00 00 19 0e ff 20 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 20: 01 40 01 03 03 ff 03 01 08 ff 00 53 ff ff ff ff
saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 30: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
tuner: Ignoring new-style parameters in presence of obsolete ones
tuner: chip found at addr 0xc0 i2c-bus saa7134[0]
tuner: type set to 33 (MT20xx universal) by saa7134[0]
tuner: microtune: companycode=3cbf part=42 rev=2f
tuner: microtune MT2050 found, OK
tda9887: Ignoring new-style parameters in presence of obsolete ones
tda9885/6/7: chip found @ 0x86
saa7134[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
saa7134[0]: registered device vbi0



But this can't be all to do? I mean, the only thing I have done to try it to work is "#modprobe saa7134" and then started up xawtv/tvtime/kdetv. It has to be more? All info I've found on google is so complicated aso...

that looks fine to me, that 2nd to last line says that you should now have a /dev/video0 device connected to the card, on v4l2. so running "xawtv -c /dev/video0" should really be all you need to do.

$ xawtv -c /dev/video0
This is xawtv-3.94, running on Linux/i686 (2.6.9-ARCH)
WARNING: Your X-Server has no DGA support.
WARNING: couldn't find framebuffer base address, try manual
configuration ("v4l-conf -a <addr>")
v4l2: open /dev/video0: Permission denied
v4l2: open /dev/video0: Permission denied
v4l: open /dev/video0: Permission denied
no video grabber device available



Didn't work... :-( More ideas? I'm still not understanding any of this...
And what did you mean about set the right freq tables before?

Make sure tuner is loaded and through dmesg if it got detected. If it did not get detected, look through the CARDLIST file located in the kernel documentation and specify what tuner type the tuner should be. For an example modprobe tuner type=2 or modprobe tuner=39. For old programs that does not work with v4l2. Load v4l1-compat. Also make sure videodev is loaded.

Also try to run scantv.

In tvtime did you press i to select the composite or S-Video connectors.

tvtime does not suck. Its a lot better than xawtv.

odd that you've not got access... try "chmod 555 /dev/video0" and try again, that's the permissions mine have

$scantv gives me this:
v4l2: open /dev/v4l/video0: Permission denied
v4l2: open /dev/v4l/video0: Permission denied
v4l: open /dev/v4l/video0: Permission denied
no grabber device available

If you look at my dmesg output above it says some about the tuner. Is something missing from that that I need to do or is it fine as is?

From lsmod I get this:
video_buf 22276 1 saa7134
v4l2_common 6528 1 saa7134
v4l1_compat 15108 1 saa7134
i2c_core 24704 3 tda9887,tuner,saa7134
ir_common 5252 1 saa7134
videodev 10496 1 saa7134
soundcore 10848 2 saa7134,snd

Pressing "i" in tvtime doesn't do anything (that I can see anyway).

Make sure /dev/video0 and /dev/vbi0 exist also make sure they are readable by you. You can check if xawtv can access those devices by running it as root. If it works by running as root, you need to change permissions for /dev/video0 and /dev/vbi0. If you do not understand what I mean permissions, type "ls -l /dev/video* /dev/vbi*" or "ls -l /dev/v4l/*" I or someone can explain about the permissions and how to set them to make any video grabber program access them without any problems.

me and my xawtv 1.3% CPU usage beg to differ.

hehe, i type too slowly... read my reply above if you missed it.