Dear list members (and especially Gerd), Summary of my letter: I am looking for documentation/howto about bttv tuner module debugging/hacking. Details: I have bougth a Pinnacle PCTV card recently. The card works under Win2k, works with Composite/S-VIDEO input under Linux, but not with RF input. The visible chips on the card are Connexant-878, and Phillips TDA9885. The RF part, however, enclosed in a sealed Faraday-cell that I am not able to open without risking my warranty (it would involve quite an amount of SMD soldering work). After doing some websearching I am now confident that there is a tuner driver problem with the card under Linux. I use a debian unstable with stock debian 2.4.22-1-686 kernel, bttv cardtype=39. The tuner modules bootstraps the tda9887 module, whose source file claims that it indeed supports TDA9885 as well. According to the kernel messages the bttv tuner module thinks that this card has an MT2032universal tuner, but later it warns: "it is not a MT2032". I even have made a short shellscript that loaded/unloaded the bttv/tuner/tda9887 modules to/from the kernel with different tuner type=xx arguments for all known tuner type numbers for my bttv (1-40), none of them seems to work, the experiments has been made with xawtv. It is interesting that if my /etc/modules.conf contains cardtype 39 for bttv and tuner type 1 for tuner, then during the first launch of xawtv the screen shows a mis-tuned station. When I try to fine-tune it, it disappers and never comes back until the next cold reboot (i.e., with cycling AC power). I have registered at Pinnacle and ask for help, but no answer so far. I have registered at MicroTune Inc. (MT) and asked for help with this tuner, but no answer so far. I have read rumours that the new Pinnacles might have a new tuner chip MT2050 and there is a press release from MT that they won primary supplier status for their MT2050 one-chip-on-silicon-solution RF-tuner from Pinnacle. They stated in April that thely "will" (when?) supply MT2050 for the Pinnacle PCTV series. However, I have not been able to found sound confirmations of that the actual tuner chip change has been indeed done in Pinnacle PCTV production, anywhere on the net. I am quite frustrated about the situation: I have chosen Pinnacle purposefully on the belief that is supported under Linux.... I might even consider the try to hack the tuner code myself, however, I have almost zero knowledge about RF broadcast technology, neither programming an RF tuner. However, there is an API description for the MT203x tuners on MT's website, so I guess that hacking the tuner code for MT2050 should not be an awfully big problem. Any kind help about where to start reading, even including RTFM with URL would be highly appreciated Thanks, Gabor
