Hi again,

I have an old Zoltrix pci tv card that I want to use to capture some video 
from an old camcorder (a Sony Handycam). To start with, I'm just trying to get 
it working with kdetv. I'm getting video on channel 3 in kdetv, but no audio.

I have the camcorder hooked up through an s-video cable. The camcorder also 
has A/V output. The tv card has a A/V video in plug, but no audio in plug, so 
I definitely wouldn't get audio in that way. It also has an RF-in coax plug, 
but for that I'd need to buy an RF modulator. The tv card also has an audio 
out jack, but connecting my speakers to this instead of the sound card output 
doesn't give me any sound either.

I guess the first question is should I be getting sound through an s-video 
connection, or is that video only? I thought it should give me both, but I've 
never used it before. I can't find any menu setting on the camcorder that 
might control this. When I hook up the A/V cable to my television I get 
sound.

Internally, the tv card has audio in and audio out ports, using the same type 
of four pin cable as cd and dvd drives do for analog audio. My motherboard 
only has one audio port for this type of cable (I'm using the on-board 
audio), so I have the tv card audio out hooked to it.

I can't find any BIOS settings that would control this port, other than 
enabling or disabling the entire audio device. I didn't see any jumper 
settings that might control this either. But it should be enabled by default, 
right?

I thought about hooking it back to the dvd drive and playing a music cd or a 
movie, to see if I can get sound that way. But I already get sound from these 
without this, so how would I know if it's really working? Would I use 
alsamixer or kmix to disable the other inputs?

Since this motherboard port is intended for cd analog audio, I'm guessing that 
this is the CD device in alsamixer/kmix, correct? I tried this first, but I 
also tried all the other input devices, in case I was wrong. In fact, I think 
I tried every possible combination of audio settings in kdetv (for both ALSA 
and OSS drivers) and in alsamixer and kmix (which adjust the same things, 
right?)

I even tried connecting the audio in port on the tv card instead of the audio 
out, in case they're labelled wrong (perhaps labelled in terms of the 
computer instead of in terms of the tv card), but that didn't help either.

I haven't been able to find any technical specs on the card (I think it's too 
old). lspci lists it as:

00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt848 Video Capture 
(rev 12)

Alsamixer lists it as:

Card: VIA 8237
Chip: C-Media Electronics CMI9761

It's using the bttv driver. I haven't configured any settings for the driver 
(I haven't been able to find any explanation of what any of these settings 
mean). The harddrake2 "Configure module" dialog lists the following 
parameters: radio, bigendian, bttv_verbose, bttv_gpio, bttv_debug, irq_debug, 
gbuffers, gbufsize, automute, chroma_agc, adc_crush, whitecrush_upper, 
whitecrush_lower, vcr_hack, irq_iswitch, triton1, vsfx, latency, card, pll, 
tuner, autoload, vbibufs, vbi_debug, and i2c_scan. I have no clue what any of 
these mean. 

Google hasn't pointed me to any useful information sources. None of the docs 
are any newer than kernel 2.4, and many refer to 2.0 or 2.2!

kdetv is at version 0.8.8. The newest stable version is 0.8.9, but I can't get 
that to install (for some reason it fails trying to install Bulgarian locale 
support, and I can't find how to make it stop that; I don't speak Bulgarian, 
and it's not even an installed locale on my machine, so I don't know why they 
made it a required part of the install). I don't really think that's the 
source of the problem anyway.

Any suggestions?

Ron
-- 
Opinions are mine. Don't blame anyone else. Rely on them at your own risk.
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