I have spent the last week googling and searching the v4l list, this forum, and other various pages, including but not limited to the gentoo saa7134 guide, the fedora forum, linuxquestions, howtoforge, etc... and I'm still stuck.

I need to mention that this card works great in XP. I also have 2 of the cards, but only 1 is actually in the computer. Both do the same thing when put in alone or togehter. Both work great in XP (but not at the same time in XP)

The first thing I did was check with bttv over at bytesex.org and I found that my card is supported in various patches. I read the patches and found that the patch updated the /usr/src/kernelver/driver/media/video/saa7134/ directory (every file in that dir) and adds in support for 55 cards, which is BEYOND the 33 cards found in the /usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.11-9-chw-2/Documentation/video4linux/CARDLIST.saa7134

I also found that this patch had already been added to the kernel on the R5A16 disc by checking for the lines of code in the various files in the /driver/media/video/saa7134/ directory. This stopped me from continuing to try recompiling kernels all day. Thank God.

After first installing (with auto install) R5A16, when I pullup X, I can go and run xawtv (BEFORE doing anything with the myth setup), change from PAL to NTSC and it shows VERY messy video. Then as soon as I change to us-cable (from europe cable) or attempt to change a channel, that short moment of video is lost forever.

Here is my fresh install dmesg (well, the part about the card anyway, dmesg is very long)



As you can see, it sees the card. It assigns it the correct card=40 and tuner=17. Everything looks good right? It should be working like a champ right? But no. Of course not. I try apt-get install tvtime (since it gives a few more options than xawtv) and it shows all the right connections but still nothing. so so sad.

I got very confused trying to figure out what to do now. I have seen people on this forum saying to add things into the /etc/modules and some saying to add to the /etc/modprobe.conf (which doesnt even exsits although from what I understand, 2.6+ uses modprobe.conf and 2.4 uses the modules file.) Very confusing. Then I thought, hey maybe I have the defualt settings too high fro recording (forget that tvtime and xawtv dont show video) and I set them all to pretty low settings. Nope.

STEALTH EDIT=
I tried using rmmod saa7134, and modprobe saa7134 card=19 (a very close cousin), card=40, tuner=17, etc.... no go. Also, another fun thing is that the remote kinda sorta works out of the box. The arrow keys work, but nothing else. I'll figure that out later, but it shows that it at least sees the stinking IR port correctly.


I would just ditch the cards and buy something better, but the wife says no. I'm at my witts end and I really need any help I can get.

Thanks.

Tom..er.. Bathroom Ninja

any ideas if I should be using modprobe or modules?

ok here's the deal with modprobe vs modules/modutils.

First in debian even on 2.4 you put the options in files in the /etc/modutils directory which then got uptaded and put in /etc/modules.conf. At any rate that's just a history lesson as current versions R5Ax use 2.6 kerrnel. With the 2.6 kernel is parses all files that are in /etc/modprobe.d whenever you issue the modprobe command, so you put the options there. Also you can use /etc/modprobe.conf it is supposed to probe that as well if it exists, but I never use it. Now for the confusing part. if you have a look in the files in /etc/modprobe.d you'll find a knoppmyth file it basically says see /etc/mythtv/modules/foo (foo being bttv ivtv etc). so the proper way to make changes in knoppmyth to keep everything in order and getting backed up for upgrades is to make the changes in /etc/mythtv/modules/bttv in your case.

hope that clears up the modules params issue. unfortunately I don't know anything about your card. The one thing you might want to look into is making sure there are not any duplicate modules for instance I know the v4l2 dir has some duplicate modules to the ivtv dir and this can cause problems with ivtv cards in some cases. Not saying this is your issue, but just something to check that you have no duplicates of the modules your card uses.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

thank you! Still no idea what the problem is (aside from me being a cheap bastard) but this gives me a great start.

I'm having this exact same issue, please post a solution if you figure this out. Thank you.

I know this is a very old post, but I was searching and stumbled across it.

Had yall ever gotten it working? I got this card not too long ago and I got it running pretty well. Just takes some time googling and trial and error. If anyone needs help with this card let me know.