[ILUG] cheap linux compatible tv tuner cards

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

in case anyone's looking for a cheap tv tuner card, Peats on Parnell Street
are currently selling a Pinnacle card which uses the SAA7134 chip.  It's
Eur20 and works out of the box with any recent linux kernel.  Admittedly it
doesn't do mpeg encoding but for Eur20 you can't complain.

If you use an oldish (before about 2.6.14) kernel you just need to:

	modprobe saa7134 oss=1

or with more recent kernels a choice of:

	modprobe saa7134 saa7134-oss
	modprobe saa7134 saa7134-alsa

depending on whether you want it to appear as an oss or alsa sound
device.  You can tune stations using scantv & v4lctl.  Then mplayer will
work with either of:

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:adevice=/dev/dsp1:audiorate=32000:forceaudio=1:immediatemode=0
mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:alsa=1:adevice=hw.1,0:amode=1:audiorate=32000:forceaudio=1:immediatemode=0

or you can use the same options with mencoder to record tv.  The unwieldy
tv options can be stuck in .mplayer/config and .mplayer/mencoder.  You can
teach mplayer your stations and so forth too.

There's even a cdrom included with drivers for some operating system which
doesn't have them by default.  This makes a pretty coffee coaster.

Gavin