ATI TV-Wonder VE
Warning: This page has been locked and archived on September 27, 2010. The official documentation for this card can be found at ATI/AMD_TV-Wonder_VE. This page remains as there is significant information herein not included in the official documentation. Please migrate any such information to the proper location.
Capture Card Information | |
Vendors Website | http://www.ati.com/products/tvwonderve/index.html |
Input Formats | not applicable |
Support Status | Works with Myth, however the card has no MPEG encoder so watching/recording TV will be CPU intensive. |
Driver | bttv |
Sound Driver | not applicable |
Chipset | not applicable |
Contents
Description
Single-tuner TV card. Unlike the TV Wonder, the VE does not support btaudio.
Issues and Problems
Associated Software
Nothing yet ...
Installation guides
Nothing yet ...
FAQs
Nothing yet ...
User Experiences
Ack, so I figured everything out and the card is working flawlessly. I had to set up my /etc/modules.conf to use the option "bttv tuner=2" in order to get it to automatically load the NTSC (US standard) frequencies (?).
poppa-serve ~ # grep bttv /etc/modules.conf alias char-major-81 bttv options bttv tuner=2
My kernel auto-configured itself to use card number 64:
poppa-serve ~ # dmesg |grep bttv bttv: driver version 0.9.16 loaded bttv: using 8 buffers with 2080k (520 pages) each for capture bttv: Bt8xx card found (0). bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:00:0c.0, irq: 10, latency: 128, mmio: 0xe3001000 bttv0: detected: ATI TV Wonder/VE [card=64], PCI subsystem ID is 1002:0003 bttv0: using: ATI TV-Wonder VE [card=64,autodetected] bttv0: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=00ffffff [init] bttv0: using tuner=2 bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA9875 @ 0xb0... not found bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA7432 @ 0x8a... not found bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA9887 @ 0x86... not found bttv0: registered device video0 bttv0: registered device vbi0 bttv0: PLL: 28636363 => 35468950 .. ok bttv0: PLL can sleep, using XTAL (28636363).
This also fixed my original issue with the channels being black and white and off by one.
Then, for the longest time I couldn't figure out why MythTV wasn't recording sound with my programs. This card has a line out jack in the back of it that needs a little jumper cable that then plugs into the sound card's line in jack. I could hear the TV just fine when unmuting the Line channel in alsamixer, but it wouldn't record in MythTV. I finally figured out that I had to use amixer to turn on the capture capability for line in:
poppa-serve ~ # amixer get Line Simple mixer control 'Line',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-exclusive Capture exclusive group: 0 Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Front Left: Playback 31 [100%] [off] Capture [off] Front Right: Playback 31 [100%] [off] Capture [off] poppa-serve ~ # amixer set Line cap poppa-serve ~ # amixer get Line Simple mixer control 'Line',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-exclusive Capture exclusive group: 0 Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Front Left: Playback 31 [100%] [off] Capture [on] Front Right: Playback 31 [100%] [off] Capture [on]
Now it works just fine.
TV Card: ATI TV Wonder VE MK2 (tvwonder mk2) on Gentoo Linux
Installing MythTV on Gentoo itself so far has been a breeze. However, when I got MythTV running and recognizing my card and cable provider, I could not (and still can't) get the video working. At first I was getting choppy video in black and white with several waves flowing through the picture. After looking up some bits and pieces I came across a Freevo Wiki bttv page with useful information.
The above goes over the basics of the bttv driver settings necessary to get your card recognized correctly. I noticed I was having the same issue as the author of that page, which was this: though my card was detected successfully, the tuner on my card was *not* detected correctly. The auto-detect found my tuner to be of type 19, which is a PAL Temic tuner. Being that I'm in the U.S. we use NTSC base TV, thus it seems fairly obvious that a PAL tuner was not the correct tuner.
The method for manually identifying your tuner is to look at the top of the metal box attached to the TV card and note the maker and model of the tuner itself. Mine is of a Phillips make, model FI1236 MK2. After checking the tuner table, I found that mine is supposed to be tuner 17. After following the method of manually setting the tuner to 17, I am now finding that I get nothing but blue screen with static lines going through it. Attempting to bring the tv input up in the xawtv utility is also proving futile. I will try to report back if I find any details.
Fixing the video
In order to fix channel offset, poor color, I added the following lines to /etc/modprobe.conf: options bttv card=64 tuner=2
- It was /etc/modprobe.conf on my system (Arch Linux). May be different for you.