ATI TV-Wonder VE

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ATI TV WONDER VE

AKA: is the hardware known by other names?

Vendors Website: http://www.ati.com/products/tvwonderve/index.html

Support Status: Works with Myth, however the card has no MPEG encoder so watching/recording TV will be CPU intensive.

Driver: bttv

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 autoconfigured 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 umuting 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 myth tv running and recongizing 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.