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Tuning In: Getting a Bt Based TV Tuner Card To Function With Linux

An odd thing happened here at TheLinuxGurus.org, I was asked the same question by multiple readers within the span of two days. Each of them wrote me e-mail asking if I had any information on how to get their TV tuner card to work with Linux. I just happen to own a TV tuner card so I decided to write a brief tutorial on how to get one operational. You will be quite surprised how easy it is.

I originally bought my TV tuner card for one reason, I did not own a regular TV. Ok, you might be thinking in todays day and age that is a bit strange, but I just do not watch enough TV (or at least I didn't) to warrant the purchase price of a regular TV. I came across a TV tuner card on sale and took it home. It took me a little while to get it going. My tuner card uses one of the Bt series of chips, therefore I will show you how to get a card with one of these chips going. If you do not own a card based on the Bt series of chips do not worry, the procedure is nearly identical and I will provide resources at the end to further guide you. In fact, the only real difference is the loading of the last module, you should load your video cards driver instead of the bttv driver.

Loading The Modules
If you are running a fairly recent distribution of Linux you are probably in luck. You will simply need to load three modules. The first module we need to load is the video4linux module. We load it with the command:

modprobe videodev

As long as you do not get an error message everything has gone correctly so far. The next module we need is the tuner module. Load it with the command:

modprobe tuner

The next module we must load is the actual Bt chip driver and is called bttv. However, we need a bit of information first. We need to know where our video buffer begins in memory. To do this issue this command:

cat /proc/pci

Look for the entry for your video device. Mine looks like this:

 VGA compatible controller: 3Dfx Unknown device (rev 1).
      Vendor id=121a. Device id=5.
      Fast devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  IRQ 9.
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe4000000 [0xe4000000].
      Prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe8000000 [0xe8000008].
      I/O at 0xc000 [0xc001].

TV Viewing Software
I must admit, I am partial to Kwintv. It is easy to use and setup and has never crashed on me. It is pretty versatile, you can use it with either a PAL or NTSC broadcast or cable connection. Of course, we all know that all Linux reviews are bought, so by saying good things about Kwintv I am entitled to free copies of Kwintv for life. In order to get and install Kwintv simply follow the link. On the left side of the page you will see a download section. Get the 0.7.5 version in the tar.gz format. Once you have it downloaded, uncompress and untar it with the following command:

tar xvzf kwintv-0.7.5.tar.gz

Now cd to the created directory like so:

cd kwintv-0.7.5

Now we have to compile and install kwintv with the following three commands:

./configure
make
make install
Ok, you should be ready to go. To start Kwintv simply issue this command:

kwintv

The first time you start kwintv it will scan for channels, simply set what input you want. In the USA your going to want NTSC format, in Europe you will use PAL format. I have discovered that the tuners on these cards are not that powerful and require a pretty strong signal so broadcast channels using an antenna do not come in very well. However, cable channels come in great.

Other TV tuning software
For those that have a distaste for KDE applications here is a list of other TV tuning software. You can also find a couple of links for ATI and AccuView chip sets for those that do not have a Bt based card. However, I have not tried them out.

• ggitv - a tv-application for GGI
• GnomeTV is a TV & Teletext viewer for Gnome
• AccuView TV/Video Video4Linux driver
• wmtv is a WindowMaker TV applet for most TV cards supported by the Linux bttv kernel driver. It currently supports full screen viewing and is still somewhat buggy
• XawTV is a simple Xaw-based TV program which uses the bttv driver or video4linux. It also contains various command-line utilities for grabbing images and AVI movies, tuning in TV stations, etc.
• GATOS (General ATI TV and Overlay Software): ATI-TV for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc....

The End
Ok, that should get your tuner card operational. If you have problems you can contact me. I cannot guarantee I can help, but I will try. You can also read the kernel documentation located at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/video4linux/