Watching TV through Linux
 

I've taken on the project of making my own PVR. It's been a hassle, but I've been enjoying myself... so anyway, here's the issue.

I'm running Fedora Core 3, and using a ATI TV Wonder VE card. Fedora seems to recognize the TV card ok. However, the channels are offset by one. Channel 7 shows up as channel 8, etc. What would cause that?

And I was getting a washed out image as well:

http://www.berkleyidiots.com/~moskie/tv2.jpg

However, after trying out a few different TV viewing programs, I stumbled upon TVTime. TVTime has an option called "Finetune current channel", which allows you to "increase" or "decrease" an unnamed value... It doesn't describe what it's doing or what it's changing, but if I "increase" this option to +10, the image gets a lot better:

http://www.berkleyidiots.com/~moskie/tv1.jpg

Anyone have an idea as to what it's increasing? Maybe I can try to do what TVTime is doing in other programs as well....

Well, what program are you wanting to use to make your machine into a DVR? TVTime is just a television viewing program.

I recommend MythTV.

It looks like you are set for european channels. It seems to be a popular default and one of the top FAQ's of MythTV

Here's a quote from their faq:

as it turns out, that finetune setting was slightly adjusting the frequency. i found a similar setting in MythTV as well. I guess I was telling it to look at a frequency 10 MHz higher, or something. And I'm pretty sure I had my programs set to look at the US cable frequencies, so I'm not sure what was actually happening.