Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

When I was using Windows XP I bought an Internal TV Tuner card for my system so I could watch a show or two just in case someone was watching a program on TV at the same time. I found that configuring Ubuntu to use this TV Tuner wasn’t exactly a piece of cake. However I managed to get the picture and sound. Although the sound isn’t exactly very clear.

First of all, the TechCom SSD-TV 670 was the card I was using and it is based on the Phillips saa7130 chipset.After installation I saw that the device was actually detected but it wouldn’t display anything when using programs like TvTime, MythTv or XawTv.

To get this to work I had to first run the following commands.
sudo rmmod saa7134_alsa
sudo rmmod saa7134
sudo modprobe saa7134 card=3 tuner=69

What this does is basically unloads both the saa7134_alsa module and the saa7134 modules which are the modules that get loaded for the TV Tuner. There are various number sequences you can try to get your TV Tuner to work but I think I got the best performance out of the card=3 and tuner=69 combo.

Now that you have loaded the module lets install a program needed to watch TV. You can do that by running the command.
sudo apt-get install TvTime
I chose TvTime cause it seemed to be much easier to use than MythTV however MythTv also allows you to record the shows as well. Now go to the terminal and type TvTime and if your card was detected properly it should actually find the channels automatically or at least in my case it did. If yours didn’t then you can right click on the TvTime Window and use the Input Source options and see if you can scan for channels after changing the Video Source as shown in the screenshot below.

Another way of scanning for channels is by using the command.

tvtime-scanner

To get Ubuntu to load the saa7134 module with these options each time when it boots you need to add these options by editing the /etc/modprobe.d/options file. To do this run the following command

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Then append this line to the end.
options saa7134 card=3 tuner=69

You would substitute the numbers with the proper numbers you are using. For further information about configuring TV Tuner cards you can check the following sites.
LinuxTv
The Gentoo Wiki for saa7134 stuff.

Just for future reference. TechCom Internal TV Tuners are horrible and your better off getting something that supports the bt878 modules in Ubuntu or any Linux distro for that matter. If I’m correct the PixelView Internal ones support this module and should work easily or with some minor headaches. Pinnacle ones have some based on the saa713x chipset and hence they tend to be a pain as well but there are some which do work on the bt878 modules. Further more configuring a USB TV Tuner can be a bigger hassle since there are only a few supported.You can check the above mentioned sites for more information about that.