[Lancaster] Help needed with Anaogue/Digital TV/Radio Card under Linux

[Martyn Welch]

Hi Ken,

I'm not familiar with this exact card and I'm not the hottest with Suse, 
however I'll attempt a few pointers.

Parameters can be passed to modprobe and insmod. If the module isn't 
loaded at boot then it can be added to /etc/modules (I think). 
Parameters can be added to /etc/modules.conf (look at the manpage/ 
existing rules to work this out).

Radio cards usually create a /dev/radioX devices (X being a number), 
likewise TV cards produce a /dev/videoX device.

To use them on the desktop - kradio for the radio (or gnome-radio) and 
KDETV for the TV part. To test the TV part on the command line you can 
use mplayer, something like this from the command line:

mplayer /dev/video0

I've recently been playing around with some analogue TV cards and MythTV 
- I have this connected to my TV to record and playback TV (and play 
music, show weather information, DVDs, etc). I'm afraid I haven't had a 
chance to play around with digital TV cards yet (our aerial sucks) 
However I assume that these are fairly similar.

In my experience radio cards just work (assuming there is a driver) and 
allow you to search for radio stations much as you do with a normal 
radio. The TV card software generally needs to scan for channels (like a 
TV does when you first set it up) then you can assign names/numbers to 
the channels.

Hope that helps,

Martyn

Ken Hough wrote:
> Dan, 
>
> Thanks for your feedback. I haven't yet had time to study this, but it looks 
> like it might give a few clues.
>
> My TV card uses the Philllips saa134 rather than em28xx.
>
> The saa7134 and saa1734_dvb modules do get loaded, but I expect that I need to 
> provide some parameters, as mentioned below.
>
> Thanks again.
>
> Ken Hough
>
> On Saturday 04 October 2008 17:56, you wrote:
>   
>> Quoting Ken Hough <kenhough at btinternet.com>:
>>     
>>> Anyway, on to my second point:
>>>
>>> This PC includes a PCI digital/analogue TV/FM Radio card (a KWorld
>>> DVB-T 210),
>>> which I've proved to work under Vista. There is some info on the Internet
>>> to the effect that this card has been made to work under Linux (Ubuntu
>>> and SUSE), but this is not an area where I really know what I'm doing. I
>>> know that when the appropriate modules are loaded (saa7134 and
>>> saa7134_dvb) it's necessary to specify parameters such as 'card=xx' and
>>> 'tuner=xx', but am floundering as to how to do the job properly.
>>>
>>> Does anyone know how to do this, or can point me towards clear
>>> information as to how to do this?
>>>       
>> I have a KWorld dvb-t USB dongle thingy. I found this advice to work:
>> http://www.2nrds.com/digital-tv-in-linux-with-em28xx-devices
>>
>> I must say it took me ages to muck about and get working originally as
>> there seems to be lots of conflicting advice. Each time the kernel
>> gets updated the steps in that page have to repeated. I recently
>> swapped Fedora for Ubuntu and it works for both of them so I reckon it
>> might work for Suse.
>>
>> Anyhow, that's how I got it to work.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Dan
>>     
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lancaster mailing list
> Lancaster at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/lancaster
>