I've got the ATI video card sending graphics images to the TV connectors (both composite video and S-Video work!) The big trick here was nothing special at all. Just change the driver type from the standard ATI r128 driver to use the VESA driver (i.e. edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and change the video driver from r128 to vesa). The only other trick was to reboot with at least one of the TV video connectors plugged in. What will happen is that BIOS will startup with the standard POST tests (i.e. memory tests) and linux will get started... it discovers the ATI graphics card (happens to be an AGP card for me) and then the screen goes black. I used ssh to login from another computer (since my linux box is on a network) and from there I could startup X (startx) and blamo - graphics on a TV. Very cool. I thought this was going to be the hard one.

I also got the IVTV drivers compiled, installed and started up. The trick with them was to extract the firmware from the latest drivers (so goto http://www.hauppauge.com/ and chase around their download section until I found the latest driver, downloaded it and extracted the firmware with the utils/iftvfwextract.pl script - which put them into the /lib/modules directory), setup the good old /etc/modules.conf to load things and depmod ivtv and blamo - another set of drivers loaded. I've only captured black backgrounds so far... but it's getting closer. I plugged in my cable to the capture card, but I haven't tried to tune for channels yet. That'll come with mythtv (I think).

I've also setup mysql - just go to www.mysql.com and get the latest version and it has easy directions on how to install.

Next will be the remote control stuff... soon.
9:12:43 PM  #     comment []  trackback []