To watch TV and video content on your PC, you must install a supported TV
card or have a video/TV combo card installed. You can find a current list of
TV and video cards supported in Linux at
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.
Freely available Linux support for TV display from video cards that have a
TV-out jack is improved over what was possible a couple of years ago, but it
is still rather poor. That support must come from the X driver, not from a
video device that Video4Linux supports with a device driver. Some of the
combo TV-tuner/video display cards have support, including the Matrox
Marvel, the Matrox Rainbow Runner G-Series, and the RivaTV cards. Many
other combo cards lack support, although an independent developer might
have hacked something together to support his own card. Your best course of
action is to perform a thorough Internet search with Google.
Many TV-only PCI cards are supported. In Linux, however, they are
supported by the video chipset they use, and not by the name some
manufacturer has slapped on a generic board. (The same board is typically
sold by different manufacturers under different names.) The most common
chipset is the Brooktree Bt*** series of chips, supported by the bttv
device driver.
If you have a supported card in your computer, it should be detected during
installation. If you add it later, the hardware-detection utility should detect it
and configure it. It is possible to try to configure it by hand, but because the
Ubuntu kernel czars try to compile every hardware option available as a
module and make it available, doing so isn’t likely to be of much use. Even
so, this is what you would do.
First, to determine what chipset your card has, use the lspci command to
list the PCI device information, find the TV card listing, and look for the
chipset that the card uses. For example, the lspci output for one computer
shows the following.
Click here to view code image
matthew@seymour~:$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-760 [IGD4-1P]
System
Controller (rev 13)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-760 [IGD4-1P]
AGP Bridge
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super
South] (rev 40)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586B PIPC Bus
Master IDE (rev 06)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 1a)