having a problem with watching tv. when i put on the tv in mythtv it gives me a Black screen and on top it has static on top.
also i have no sound coming out of either the tv card and the motherboard.

set up
shuttle fv24 with a via 933mhz
384mb ram
40gb laptop hd
dvd drive
avermedia pci300 tv/fm tuner card

also im a linux/unix newbie so i dont know much about the os. so please describe it very well on how to do it. thanks

anyone wanna take a stab at this?

Look in /var/log/messages (or is it dmesg?) and see if the bttv driver autodetected your card or says something like GENERIC UNKNOWN. If that is the case you need to tell the card what the tuner is. There's plenty of posts on the forum about that. Useful search terms might be "tuner etc modules bttv". Try getting your card working using xawtv so that you first know that the driver is installed correctly (then your channels don't need to be set up in mythtv properly)

where would i input that?

Not sure what you are asking. I made several suggestions and I think the best one would probably be to search the forum. I have seen many posts complaining of static and it's usually tuner related. This is to some extent a self help forum when it comes to questions that have been answered a million times already. I'm guessing thats why no one responded to you in the first place. Now if you are a complete newb and have "No Idea", try to be a little more descriptive in your questions so it is clear what you are asking.
On the whole people are fairly helpful around here especially if you show that you have tried to help yourself first.

well i did search for my problem first typed in tv card,static with no help that i could understand.
what i mean by the post before is how and where do i put in /var/log/messages ? i have been tring to to do a search for a few days and still cant find a simple answer that i could understand.

/var/log/messages is a log file containing system related log information. dmesg is a command that you can run to see bootup log messages. One of these places is where you will see messages output by the tvcard driver when it attempts to autodetect your card (if indeed it is auto-detecting)

This post shows an example of the output:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1688&highlight=generic+unknown+bttv
Look for similar output in your logs.

Notice that the example shows two bttv cards, one was has a specific card and the other is unknown/generic.

Oh, and by the way, /var/log/messages gets appended to each time you boot, whereas dmesg only shows the boot logs for the current boot.

ok after a few days of trying i have tried to learn some what about linux and how to work with it. ok i found out that my tv card is being recognized as AverMedia TVPhone98/vcr but its not a TVPhone98/vcr its a pci300 but thats not the case i still cant figure out how to get the tv to show any but the static on top and the rest is black. i have read a few threads and done searchs but cant seem to find any help.

If it is recognising the card or tuner wrong, it is not going to control the card properly and you will only see garbage. You probably need to tell the driver which card/tunre you are using with card=/tuner= parameters.

This post http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1740 shows how I did if for my framegrabber card back berfore I had a DVB card.

The location of the file to put the parameters in may have changed but that post should give you enough clues to work on.

ok i will try that tonight to see if that works.
but how do i get to Setting up BTTV/Tuner Module Options? or do i just input card=/tuner= parameters in to nano or xedit?

ok i tried it and i just got tired of tring im going to get a hauppauge pvr250. i already upgraded to a p3 1.2ghz so with the pvr it should not tax on my cpu. thanks anyways bro. ur very help full.