How to get KWorld TV Tuner working under Linux

[Santanu Chatterjee]

Hi Everybody,

I installed a KWorld TV878 TV Tuner card
recently, and after some googling, I was able to get the card detected
using the following :
------------------------------------------------------
modprobe bttv card=78 tuner=5 radio=1
------------------------------------------------------

Now the problem is that tvtime only shows me the last channel I viewed
under WindowsXP. Other than that no other frequency is detected.

Has someone gotten this card to work under Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, or
any other distro)?

Somewhere I read (while googling) that to get the card working in
Linux,
one has to copy some firmware file from the windows installation of the supplied
driver and make that available to bttv as a modprobe option. Apparently, the
hardware of the card itself is not sufficient, it probably needs some
configuration
prior to using it. Unfortunately, I cannot find the URL for the web
page anymore.

If would appreciate any help from you that might help me use this
under Ubuntu/Debian (or any Linux). I had to install WindowsXP just to
be able to use the card to watch World Cup. If I get this working under
Linux,
I can get back some valuable disk space.

(By the way, the FM radio part is also not working under Linux, but
I am not bothered about that.)

Regards,
Santanu Chatterjee

[TTT_travis]

I have this card and have been trying to get it to work with ubuntu for
ages, all I can get is a green screen when trying to watch the card.



Thanks,

Travis

[wenzlicker]

I had the same problem with that card. This is how I fixed it.



'HERE' (http://tinyurl.com/lkuy9)



and



'HERE'
(http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=107932&highlight=bttv)



and



'HERE'
(http://xawdecode.sourceforge.net/aideUS/htmlpage/TVCardall.htm)



Remeber, if you live inside the USA, you have NTSC (for my card it was
tuner 2). In the above links, there are links to card and tuner lists.
find the right tuner/card combination and put it in the bttv file as
described. One of the articles says no restart is need ("sudo modprobe
-r bttv to unload sudo modprobe bttv to load"). This did NOT work for
me. I had to do a restart.



Upon restarting, run tvtime-scanner. It takes a while, but if you have
the right options in your bttv file, you should have color and correct
channels. I hope this works for you. It took me a while, but i finally
got it working for me.



Happy watching.

[Santanu Chatterjee]

Post by wenzlicker
I had the same problem with that card. This is how I fixed it.
'HERE' (http://tinyurl.com/lkuy9)
and
(http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=107932&highlight=bttv)
and
(http://xawdecode.sourceforge.net/aideUS/htmlpage/TVCardall.htm)
Remeber, if you live inside the USA, you have NTSC (for my card it was
tuner 2). In the above links, there are links to card and tuner lists.
find the right tuner/card combination and put it in the bttv file as
described. One of the articles says no restart is need ("sudo modprobe
-r bttv to unload sudo modprobe bttv to load"). This did NOT work for
me. I had to do a restart.

First of all, thanks for the links. I will definitely check them out soon, and
report back on Monday or Tuesday.

I am in India where we have PAL_BG. So, I think the tuner will be 5.
So far, I have tried _all_ the 120 card types with tuner=5,
and _all_ the 45 tuner types with card=78, but none worked.

I had also followed this link for this card (KWorld VS-TV878RF):
-----------------------------------------------------
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=160271
-----------------------------------------------------
but I was not successful.

I had done 'rmmod' each time before trying a new driver. Maybe that's why it
did not work. I will try by restarting now (after modifying the
/etc/modules.d/bttv file) and will follow your links.

Regards,
Santanu

[Santanu Chatterjee]

......
I had done 'rmmod' each time before trying a new driver. Maybe that's why it
did not work. I will try by restarting now (after modifying the
/etc/modules.d/bttv file) and will follow your links.

Nope. I tried this time by first modifying the /etc/modprobe.d/bttv and then
restarting. But still the same problem. :-(

Are you sure you you have the same card (VS-TV878RF) ?
I wonder what I am missing!!

Regards,
Santanu

[wenzlicker]

I am pretty sure that?s the same card I have. If you post your bttv
file, I?ll compare it with mine. Also, I am using tvtime for the
viewer. I haven?t tried it with any other programs. What are you
using?



Once again, good luck. It took me a while to get mine working.

[Santanu Chatterjee]

I am pretty sure that's the same card I have. If you post your bttv
file, I'll compare it with mine. Also, I am using tvtime for the
viewer. I haven't tried it with any other programs. What are you
using?

I am using tvtime too.

I have uploaded all the info I could gather about my card
at the following address:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://rapidshare.de/files/25094693/KWorld_VS-TV878RF.zip.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Sorry about the very poor quality of the pictures
of the card. My Nokia-3220 would not give any better resolution)

(I had attached the file in an earlier mail to this list a couple
of hours ago, but apparently the attachment was too big (~200KB)
for the list's limit (40KB))

Regards,
Santanu

[Santanu Chatterjee]

Hi,

I got the card working!! All this time I had the solution in my
hands and I did not use it properly.

First, the chips that my card has:
Conexant Fusion 878A, TEA5767 (FM Tuner)

I followed the same procedure as mentioned in
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=160271
----------------------------------------------------------------------

As mentioned there, I put the following lines in my
/etc/modprobe.d/bttv file:
----------------------------------------------
option bttv card=78 radio=1 tuner=38 pll=1 gbuffers=4
gpiomask=0x1c0007
audiomux=0x080000,0x000001,0x080000,0x080000,0x000001
----------------------------------------------
After I rebooted, both FM Radio and TV started working perfectly!!
(So, my tuner type is 38, not 5 as was autodetected using the card=78 option)

Last time I used the same procedure, it did not work, possibly because
I was using 2.6.8 kernel in Debian Sarge. Recently, I got a SuSE 10.1 DVD
with a magazine and installed it yesterday just to see how SuSE looked.
There it worked. SuSE 10.1 is using the 2.6.16 kernel, and I think that
made the difference. Another thing I noticed was that
xawtv in SuSE could tune the channels more or less correctly, but could
not display the pictures. Even audio was working, but no picture.
On the other hand, the default TV and Radio applications (kdetv and kradio)
worked perfectly. SuSE did not come with tvtime, so I could not try it out.

My Sarge DVDs did not come with kradio and kdetv, and I don't have internet
connection at home (that's why even though I have a Dapper installation with
a 2.6.15 kernel in another partition, I could not try any tv viewing
application there
as Dapper CD does not come with it). Anyway, I will now try using the latest
kernel in Debian to get this thing working there. I am already missing
apt in SuSE.

Thanks a lot for replying to my queries. Now I can remove windows
from my system.

Regards,
Santanu

[darkteckno]

Get more help with Kworld devices here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/KWORLD-TV/