My old BrookTree Tuner card died recently. I only used it for basic chores – backup of VHS tapes, maybe watching the Deadliest Catch while I worked…

Everyone online is building DTRs using the latest technology, but that’s not how I generally work. Cheap and worthy is about the only qualification I have – and you can pick up a nice Pinnacle PC-TV Pro online for $25.00. (ebay)

The bigger problem is determining the tuner… a difficult task to do when looking at a picture of an item on ebay. When doing research on a BTTV card – I’ve got to recommend http://www.bttv-gallery.de/

Someone thankfully put a lot of research into this site. If you search around, there’s a lot of griping on the internet about “the tuner doesn’t work on so-and-so card”. Using this site, I was able to easily discern different revisions of AcerTV and Pinnacle cards – which is important when you plan on using the card under Linux.

So, here’s my card:

01:07.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
Subsystem: Pinnacle Systems Inc. PCTV pro (TV + FM stereo receiver, audio section)
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 17
Memory at fc0fe000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
Capabilities: [44] Vital Product Data <?>
Capabilities: [4c] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: Bt87x

I’ve found that for sound support, you want to make sure to load the “tuner” module PRIOR to inserting the “bttv” module  (otherwise you’ll end up with no sound). The module options that worked for me were: “bttv card=39” and “tuner=33”. If you’re looking for a full list of card and tuner numbers, look at the Linux source Documentation/video4linux/CARDLIST*

For viewing, I’m using xawtv and tvtime. I’m still fighting w/ sound issues – one _should_ be able to either set /dev/dsp1 (the bt card on my system) as the audio source – but I’ve yet to get that to work correctly.

One can also use SOX to pipe /dev/dsp1 to /dev/dsp0, but I’m still battling w/ that. I believe the following should work, but have yet to get it to execute w/o throwing errors:

sox -q -c 2 -s -r 32000 -t alsa hw:1 -t alsa -r 32000 hw:0

My current workaround is a simple 3.5mm male/male connector to connect the output of the PCTV Pro to the Aux Input of the onboard soundcard.

Recording from the card is fairly easy, too.  XawTV has an application called “streamer”, but I’m much more inclined to use menconder (part of the mplayer package):

mencoder -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lameopts mode=1:vbr=2:q=4 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -tv driver=v4l:norm=ntsc:channel=3:chanlist=us-cable:adevice=/dev/dsp:width=640:height=480 -af volume=-25 -o /tmp/tv.avi tv://