STB2 capture card; sound works in btwincap and bttv, but not in bktr

tweek tweek.20k at gmail.com
Thu Aug 25 08:10:06 GMT 2005


Right, I posted this question to freebsd-questions, and no one
answered. I'm assuming it's technical enough to warrant a post here.

I have a STB capture card, distributed in an OEM package by Gateway.
(I purchased it through eBay for $12.) It has a bt878 chip, and I have
it hooked to an SB Live! card with a four-pin audio cable, internally.
The card has both RCA and S-Video video inputs, a 'headphone'-style
jack for audio input, and two coaxial inputs - one for cable TV, the
other for an FM antenna.

I used it over the summer to play Halo 2 through, with Windows XP and
btwincap. I needed to change a few settings, (specifically, the
presence of and addresses of a few chips) as noted in
http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/faq.html, for sound to play: (what
follows is a quote from that page)

- TDA 9850 set to "Yes", 12c address 0xb6, (also try 0xb4 if audio
does not work)
- TEA 6420 set to "Yes", 12c address 0x98
- TDA 7432 set to "Yes", 12c address 0xff (the driver will autodetect it)

I usually have to set the TDA 9850 I2C address to 0xb4 to make sound
play. I use ATV2000 after that, and have no problems with S-Video
input, cable TV, etc. - everything works.

I tried Knoppix a while ago - using fxtv through its relatively easy
configuration script, (essentially, all it asks is, what card do you
have, what tuner does it have, etc.) I was able to make everything
work - with sound - without any changes.

I've been trying a number of things to get sound to play in FreeBSD.
Here is a list of things I've tried so far:

fxtv auto/internal switch: does nothing.
mixer all volumes to 100: necessary, of course, for this to work, but
does nothing.
xawtv: no change from fxtv. (these are the only two FreeBSD capture
card-specific applications I know of; mplayer was also tried, with no
result.)
new msp34xx patch: no change noted.
playing with various hw.bt848 (848...?) sysctl tunables: no change.
doing anything to the emu10k1 driver/using emu10kx: no change. (this
isn't the problem, I'm pretty sure.)
kernel sourcediving: found a few references to TDA 98something, and
messed around with a few things, but ... really no changes noted.

Here are some relevant-looking lines from dmesg:

bktr0: <BrookTree 878> mem 0xd0001000-0xd0001fff irq 5 at device 15.0 on pci0
bktr0: STB TV/PCI, Philips FR1236 NTSC FM tuner, dbx stereo.
pci0: <multimedia> at device 15.1 (no driver attached)

uname -a reports that I'm using FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p6. Here are some
lines from my kernel config:

device          bktr
device          iicbus
device          iicbb
device          iicsmb
device          smbus
options         BROOKTREE_SYSTEM_DEFAULT=BROOKTREE_NTSC
options         OVERRIDE_CARD=3
options         OVERRIDE_TUNER=9
#options      BKTR_NEW_MSP34XX_DRIVER
#options      BKTR_GPIO_ACCESS

A bit of Googling shows an old post someone who seems to have the same
the same problem, and also seems to know a bit more about it:

http://www.monkey.org/freebsd/archive/freebsd-multimedia/200306/msg00057.html

I'd appreciate any help I could get with this. I'll be moving into a
dorm room (hopefully) once the term starts, and it'll probably be
annoying to switch to Windows XP from FreeBSD just to watch a few NHL
games, and my computer is slow enough to make anything like VMware
infeasible.

Lucas Jacobs, FreeBSD user since 5.2
tweek (dot) 20k (at) gmail (dot) com


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