Hi all: I realise it's bad form to jump onto a mailing list and ask questions without looking around a bit first, but time is of the essence so I decided to do just that. Apologies if this breaks any traditions. I need to point out that I am blind. If I weren't, I probably wouldn't be writing. I mention this because finding the answer to my question is not as easy as looking at the card to see what chips are on it. I just purchased a Spirit TV card from Dick Smith Electronics here in Brisbane Australia. The person who served me told me it was a Spirit 2000, though I've not managed to find a number for it anywhere, either on Spirit's site or at DSE's site. The product I bought is described, as far as it goes, at http://www.dse.com.au/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/3ee35bda13fd0f722740c0a87f9c074f/Product/View/XH6780 There's no real technical information available on that page. the info available in store told me that it had a BT878 chipset, which is why I went with it (I knew it was supported). It didn't tell me much more, however, and no amount of careful looking at the box, the card or anything else indicated whether the card was stereo or not. Since Dick Smith's have a 7-day return policy, I decided to take it anyway, figuring that I could probably determine which of the two it was in 7 days. However, I didn't realise you needed to know which decoder chip (if any) was on the card. I didn't even know that you needed to know which tuner chip was on the card. I'm using an old Linux kernel here (2.2.20) and there were only 2 PAL-B compatible tuners, so it didn't take much effort to discover that type 5 worked. I've not had any luck trying to track down more info on this card. The card listed at Spirit's website (http://www.spiritmodems.com.au), when you eventually find it, is a BT848-based card. My card is definitely a BT878, as evidenced below: 00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 (rev 11) Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10 Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) Capabilities: <available only to root> 00:09.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 (rev 11) Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10 Memory at e0001000 (32-bit, prefetchable) Capabilities: <available only to root> Since I'm not likely to be able to get a pair of eyes on this card in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next 4 days) and seeing that fishing for a possibly non-existant decoder chip looks like a protracted exercise (given the available options), I thought I'd try and save myself some time by asking here if anyone knows whether or not this is a stereo card and, if it is, what chip it uses. Personally, I'm inclined to think it's not, since I'm guessing it would be clearly stated on the box or in the literature (correct me if I'm wrong about this). If it turns out to be mono, I'm going to take it back. If I'm going to spend this much money on a TV card, it at least has to be stereo, dammit. Given that I live in Australia and am on a budget, can anyone recommend a good stereo TV tuner card that's well supported? Being blind, I don't really care about picture quality, so I'm prepared to buy a cheap stereo card if a good picture is all I'm paying for. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Geoff. -- Geoff Shang <gshang@xxxxxxxxx> ICQ number 43634701 Make sure your E-mail can be read by everyone! http://www.betips.net/etc/evilmail.html Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
