I am trying to use a Pinnacle PCTV 50i tuner card http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSit...enna)/PCTV+50i with Fedora Core 5. I do not know the chip set Pinnacle uses, as they do not admit to this on the box for the TV tuner hardware or their website. I am not certain how Fedora 5 identified the card, as I do not know how to look this up in Fedora (still a newbie to FC 5).

Anyway, the TV tuner part works fine under tvtime, except no sound. I've gone over the hardware connections in extraordinary detail, and the computer's sound hardware tests okay, and the connections with the TV card's audio output are correct. But no sound.

The card is designed for use with Win XP, but I don't have Win XP, so I have no way to test the card in another system, with the software supplied by Pinnacle. The card is new. I'm wondering if the tuner card's audio output is defective or if this is a software problem.

Has anyone had a similar experience with TV tuner cards under Linux? Anyone have any ideas on how to troubleshoot this? Would a TV tuner program other than tvtime work?

ive had that happen once, the sound was muted :-p
i used xawtv.

Well, I've been doing a little research. On the chance this may help someone else, here's what I found at the tvtime web site:


So, I guess this is a software problem. Tvtime is not identifying the correct version of the TV card and this is resulting in a failure of the mute function. Unfortunately, there's no way to fix it - tvtime recommends getting a different TV tuner card! {By the way, I'm not sure that my Pinnacle PCTV 50i is a Pixelview Play TV clone, but this sounds a lot like my problem.}

I'd switch to a different TV tuner program, but I can't find one that will work under Fedora Core 5. Xawtv and Zapping are not available for FC 5, nor did a google search turn up any other alternatives. Of course, since it's the bttv driver itself that (evidently) is misidentifying the TV cards, it may not matter what tuner program is used - I suspect they may all use the same bttv driver.

So, no TV for me.

You could compile it yourself :-P

You would suspect correctly Im not sure how those tv tuner cards work but isnt there a way to manualy load the card=70 ? perhaps in an insmod/modprobe

You flatter me, AAnarchYY! You forget that I am, after all, A_Complete_Idiot!


Yeah, I thought about that, too. I suspect there must be a way to force the card=70 manually, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. I figured if it was easy to do, the tvtime web site might have given instructions for that, rather than recommend I buy a new card!

yep i though so, there is an insmod force, ironicly enough its card=##
look in your kernel docs, there is an entire bttv folder with tons of stuff.
well you found out some information by doing a little digging on your own, thats more than most do ;-)

so to recap, try and reload the module and check for sound.
rmmod bttv
modprobe bttv card=70

no way to fix it? you give up to easily. the bttv driver automatically sets my winfast tv2000xp to pal (tuner=5) and won't let you change it. A quick edit of the bttv source and a kernel recompile, and now the default is 43 and it works fine. problems with the bttv kernel driver will affect all linux tv applications so using xawtv won't work any better then tvtime. How is the sound hooked up for your card? mine has a cable that runs to the cd-in on my soundcard, so I had to make sure cd wasn't muted in alsa-mixer and edit the tvtime config and tell it to use cd for the volume and all worked well.

If your card is misdetected by the bttv driver and you think you know what it should be detected as it can probably be fixed by editing:

/usr/src/linux/drivers/media/video/bt8xx/bttv-cards.c

Edit:
Try AAnarchYY's solution first. I had to do this as even when I set it manualy to 43 it would still load as 5. if his solution does work you can add it to your kernel command line in your bootloader so it works everytime you boot.