chris:b Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 My last hardware challenge with Linux is my somewhat odd video card. I bought this box 2,5 years ago preassembled, it's a supermarkt pc ;-) It's running great with Linux as if it was made for this OS. So far I didn't care much about tv on a pc. Every now and then I recorded (on Windows XP) a concert. I don't have a tv-card but my NVIDIA Geforce4 MX 460 has a composite video-in and s-video in. In Winxp I connect our (tv) satellite receiver using a cable with scart/composite video/audio cable, and that's it. I can watch tv and am able to record the stream, uncompressed or compressing on the fly to different video formats. I once saw rivatv for linux. Too heavy for me. Today I had a day off, and here's how it's working for me. Mandrake 10.0 Official, kernel 2.6.3-7mdk. Step 1: After two hours reading and trying to understand the rivatv website, I had the idea to look for the riva kernel modules in /lib/modules. Surprise: they are already there. No need to download, compile and stuff. - # modprobe rivatv would lock my box COMPLETELY. Nothing goes. - solution: disable framebuffer (not that I would know what this is). How? - In lilo.conf: change the line vga=788 to vga=normal, run lilo -v, reboot. - # modprobe rivatv dma=1 Step 2: Find an application that let you watch tv. - tvtime (on the CD): I get the picture, the sound - but there is something terribly wrong. It looks like slow-motion, or loosing many frames. Tried all settings. - xawtv (on the CD): The default start of xawtv does not show the video stream, nothing. The solution was to start it with arguments: xawtv -noxv -nodga After fiddling with the settings (video norm etc), I had an acceptable tv picture - but only in a quite small format. When I expand it, the quality is solala. Sound is always ok because line-in is working. Step 3: How do I record the video/sound stream? Don't know yet. Anyone out there who has tips or explanations? How do I get better quality? Which application will work without a tv card, but is clever to use /dev/video0? And if I ever want to record, how would I do this? I would like to have a mpeg 1 format, in order to create a (s)vcd? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SwiftDeath Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 Hmm strange... normally messing with the settings in TVtime would fix it for me. Did you try running Myth Tv? I wish I could help more, but I lack the knowledge. I use a BT878 and it works fine with TvTime. Best of Luck, SwiftDeath Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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