I had an old Hauppauge WinTV GO2 (Conexant 881 chip) tuner card lying around since it stopped to work on my Vista computer, so I decided to install it on my Fedora 9 x86-64 box. Usually I hate TV cards, they never work even on Windows…Hauppauge cards are particulary bad.
So, first of all we need an application to watch TV, the best one on Fedora is called TVtime, let’s install it.
su -
yum install tvtime
Now we need to configure TVtime. My local cable network provides a list of TV channels in MHz. Launch TVtime and quit it immediately, this will create a .tvtime directory in your home directory. It contains an important file where you can put your TV channels: stationlist.xml. man stationlist.xml and man tvtime are your friends if you have any questions.
Now you can start TVtime with tvtime –frequencies=custom. You’ll probably note that you can switch channels, but that there is no picture displayed, nor sound. That’s because your TV tuner isn’t correctly detected by the driver. We are going to correct this problem. For that, we need to know the tuner type. Type dmesg | grep cx88 and look for a TV tuner type line, here you can see that I have a type 37.
[Steven@dx5150 ~]$ dmesg | grep cx88
cx88/0: cx2388x v4l2 driver version 0.0.6 loaded
cx88[0]: subsystem: 0070:3401, board: Hauppauge WinTV 34xxx models [card=1,autodetected]
cx88[0]: TV tuner type 37, Radio tuner type -1
tuner’ 1-0061: chip found @ 0xc2 (cx88[0])
cx88[0]: warning: unknown hauppauge model #34704
cx88[0]: hauppauge eeprom: model=34704
Now create a file in /etc/modprobe.d (I called it wintv), put options cx88xx tuner=37 in it. Reboot your system, launch tvtime –frequencies=custom, increase the volume in TVtime: it works!
Note that you can edit the Gnome launcher for TVtime to include the –frequencies=custom option directly.