A couple of weeks back, I went shopping looking for a TV tuner card that is compatible with Linux. Googling had told me that “Hauppauge” card was known to be compatible. However, I could not find it anywhere in the market (SP Road, Bangalore, India). On going to one of the shops, I found a “Pinnacle PCTV 50i” card. I had heard from many people before that Pinnacle was a good card for Windows both in terms of quality of decoding and software provided. I checked in google to ensure that Pinnacle card would work on Linux. I found that the card uses Philips’ SAA7134 chipset for which drivers are available in Linux. I went on and bought the card for Rs 2000 ($50).
The card is available through Amazon.com.
Pinnacle PCTV Analog PCI 50i - TV / radio tuner / video input adapter - PCI - SECAM, PAL
Setting up the card in Linux
I have Ubuntu Gutsy installed (7.10) and followed this guide to setup the card and the instructions worked like a charm. A gist of the procedure.
Ubuntu Gutsy recognizes the card automatically, the following commands help to check if the recognition happened or not. Both commands should give atleast one line of output each.
sudo update-pciids lspci | grep -i saa713 dmesg | grep saa713
Watching TV - tvtime
tvtime is a simple to use application for watching TV on Linux. Here is how you configure it.
sudo apt-get install tvtime tvtime &
Right click to open a setup menu. You can also hit [F1] or [tab] key to show configuration menu:
Linux Tvtime configuration hit [F1] or [tab] key to show configuration menu
(Fig. 01: Linux tvtime application configuration menu)
First, you need to setup video source, frequencies and channels etc.Setup video source
Visit Input Configuration > Change Video Source > Setup source as per your setup.
Setup frequencies table
You need to setup the channels you are receiving with the tuner. Here we use europe frequencies table. Visit Channel management > Change Frequency table > Select new table
Scan ChannelFinally, you need to scan for channels by visiting Channel management > Change Frequency table > Scan channels for signal > Back > Exit
Sound configuration
You need to attach internal cables to get sound out of TV tuner card. Use driver saa7134-oss or saa7134-alsa to get sound out of card. This driver get loaded automatically. Open terminal and type the following command to hear the audio through ALSA using tvtime (or other programs that don’t support it directly):
$ sox -c 2 -s -w -r 32000 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp1 -t ossdsp -w -r 32000 /dev/dsp
Recording TV using mencoder
if you do not already have mencoder, you can install it (on Debian/Ubuntu) by doing
Note that the above command will also install mplayer which is useful for viewing video files and tv channels. If you are the command line kind of person, you can do away with tvtime and use mplayer!
To record a TV channel, you will first need to figure out the frequency of the channel. For this I found scantv useful. This command will scan channels in the specified range and print out the found channels. After figuring out the frequency of the channel to record, use this mencoder command to record the video in a compressed format.
mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:input=0:norm=pal:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video0:\
freq=775.25:adevice=/dev/dsp1:forceaudio:audiorate=32000 buffersize=64\
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=400:keyint=30 -oac mp3lame\
-lameopts br=32:cbr:mode=3 -ffourcc divx -o "test.avi"
To use mplayer to view TV directly (without using tvtime),do this.
mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:input=0:norm=pal:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video0:\
freq=775.25:adevice=/dev/dsp1:forceaudio:audiorate=32000
I’ve been using this card without a glitch and recommend for HTPC attempts on Linux.
Tags: home theatre pc, HTPC, linux, mencoder, pinnacle pctv 50i, television, tv tuner card, tvtime 
bg wrote,
nvidia provides good tv tuner cards. they are all in one ,so i guess it will work for Linux
Link | March 24th, 2008 at 2:24 am
prashanthellina wrote,
Hi there! NVIDIA does have TV tuner cards but googling doesn’t paint a good picture for linux compatibility.
Link | March 24th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Ik wrote,
Hi,
Have anybody tested the same with TATA Sky ?
Link | March 27th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
prashanthellina wrote,
Whether the card works on not is totally independent from the cable operator. If it works for Doordarshan, it should work for Tata Sky too.
Link | March 27th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
she wrote,
Nice hint
does anyone have more info with mencoder?
Especially with scanning _only_ with mplayer/mencoder?
tvtime and xawtv are slowly dying
Link | March 30th, 2008 at 12:43 am
prashanthellina wrote,
I do not know if mplayer/mencoder can scan channels. I used scantv (http://linux.die.net/man/1/scantv).
Link | March 31st, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Krishna wrote,
Hey Prashanth,
It has worked for me. Thank you very much for the post.
One query, have you tried Myth TV?
cheers,
Krishna
Link | July 8th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
prashanthellina wrote,
Krisha, that’s great. I’ve been intending to but did not get around to doing it.
Link | July 17th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Valente wrote,
tvtime display fine video and sound
same with motv
but I can’t make either mencoder nor mplayer to get the SOUND, they only get video OK, but no SOUND
they don get nothing from /dev/dsp
Here is my list of hardware
lspci
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)
02:04.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev 10)
asoundconf list
Names of available sound cards:
Intel
SAA7134
cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
HDA Intel at 0xcfe38000 irq 16
1 [SAA7134 ]: SAA7134 - SAA7134
saa7133[0] at 0xcfffe800 irq 16
lsmod | grep -i snd
snd_hda_intel 344728 3
snd_pcm_oss 42144 0
snd_mixer_oss 17920 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 78596 3 saa7134_alsa,snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss
snd_page_alloc 11400 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
snd_hwdep 10500 1 snd_hda_intel
snd_seq_dummy 4868 0
snd_seq_oss 35584 0
snd_seq_midi 9376 0
snd_rawmidi 25760 1 snd_seq_midi
snd_seq_midi_event 8320 2 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi
snd_seq 54224 6 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_timer 24836 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq
snd_seq_device 9612 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq
snd 56996 18 saa7134_alsa,snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_hwdep,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device
soundcore 8800 1 snd
and doing this:
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp
I get noise on speakers (as it should be)
Please advise me what to do
Best Regards
Link | July 30th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Shahi wrote,
Your blog is good but can you tell me how will scan tv channels using mplayer………????????
There is one option i.e -tvscan autostart in mplayer but it read all frquencies which have not signals……..
Link | September 10th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
krishna wrote,
Hi Prashant,
I could successfully install Myth TV with the same card. I have Ubuntu Hardy Heron OS. And it works great. I am not able to configure the remote at the moment, though.
Thanks for suggesting the card.
Cheers,
Krishna
Link | September 30th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
DriverFinder wrote,
I can too confirm that MythTV works with this driver and my Pinnacle PCTV 50i ! Thanks for this guide really great help!
Link | November 6th, 2008 at 2:36 am
seb wrote,
Great post! Thanks for your hint about using sox!!!
Up till now I was using TVtime with sound redirection via ‘arecord -D hw:1,0 | aplay’ resulting in the sound lagging behind.
’sox -c 2 -s -r 32000 -t oss /dev/dsp1 -t oss -r 32000 /dev/dsp’ does the job! No sound lag! Thanks a million!
Running Fedora 10 with
Haupppauge WinTV HVR 900 USB
Greetings, Seb.
Link | December 11th, 2008 at 2:09 am