Linux - 3 - TV cards

Slackware linux does not appear to come with TV software by default. A quick search on google suggests xawtv is the best software. i have a normal haupauge PCI winTV card, and i managed to get it working just fine.

Install

Downloading and installing was straightforward and pain free. i followed the instructions of the haupauge website. Be sure to have modprobe lines in your /etc/rc.d/rc.modules for the following modules.

/sbin/modprobe bttv
/sbin/modprobe tuner
/sbin/modprobe videodev

Tuning

Load xawtv and use the menu to tune the channels. Alternatively, hack the file /etc/X11/xawtv with a text editor. This is my awtv file. See man xawtvrc for details.

[BBC1]
channel=44
key=F1

[BBC2]
channel=51
key=F2

[ITV] 
channel=47
key=F3 

[Channel 4]
channel=41
key=F4

[Channel 5]
channel=37
key=F5

[Video]
channel=60
key=F6

Overlay problems

Overlay? Overlay is a mechanism that allows a TV card to talk directly to the graphics card, this is a good idea as it takes the load of the central processor.

i found that 'overlay' was not working, and the result was a black empty screen when i loaded xawtv. i found i could run xawtv successfully by disabling overlay using the following.

xawtv -remote &

Unfortunately, this has the affect of slowing down the system when the TV is on. i tracked down the lack of overlay problem to the following section in my /etc/X11/XF86Config.

# This loads the miscellaneous extensions module, and disables
# initialisation of the XFree86-DGA extension within that module.
   SubSection "extmod"
      Option "omit xfree86-dga"   # don't initialise the DGA extension
   EndSubSection

By commenting out the Option "omit xfree86-dga" line overlay now works fine.