I bought a relatively cheap video capture card to use with MythTV. It was working fine with my Mepis box, but now, after not using it for a couple of months (no time to watch t.v. ), I'm getting nothing. I've had problems with MythTV before, but xawtv has always worked. I also installed TVTime and got no signal. I thought perhaps the cable company had figured out a way to separate cable tv from cable internet, so I tried getting input from my camcorder. Still nothing.

So, I need some way to check whether the problem is in how I am feeding video to the card, or whether it is in some way the card itself that is not functioning. The relevant parts of dmesg:

tuner: TV freq (38.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (32.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (26.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (20.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (14.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (8.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (8.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (14.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (20.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (26.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (32.25) out of range (44-958)
tuner: TV freq (38.25) out of range (44-958)

And a full dump of lspci:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 03)
0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB 2.0 EHCIController (rev 02)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 82)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Bridge (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) UltraATA-100 IDE Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
0000:03:04.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
0000:03:04.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
0000:03:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

With thanks to the kind folks who answer questions from clueless users like me,

Probably you have to manually set the tuner. If the card has composite or S-Video connectors, use them first. Then manually set a tuner for the bttv module.

You can add the line below in /etc/modprobe.conf or /etc/modules.conf
options bttv tuner=X

X designates the number for the tuner in the tuner cardlist file in the kernel documentation directory.

BTW, it does help to set the norm signal or Telvision signal (NTSC, PAL, PAL-60, PAL-DK). In your case it is NTSC.

Thanks for the response. I've been trying (unsuccessfully, so far) to figure out where this cardlist file is, during which I re-ran dmesg and noticed it had some other lines about my tuner (I swear they weren't there before!):

bttv0: Hauppauge eeprom: model=38101, tuner=Temic 4036FY5 (8), radio=no
bttv0: using tuner=8
tuner: chip found at addr 0xc2 i2c-bus bt878 #0 [sw]
tuner: type set to 8 (Temic NTSC (4036 FY5)) by bt878 #0 [sw]

So it looks like the module was found, which makes sense, since I have been using it successfully up until now.

Is there any way for me to test whether the card is functioning? Some manual way to send it a signal and check for a response? Would the kernel just not recognize it if it were malfunctioning?