Monitoring from a TV-tuner

[ziouzitsou]

Hi there,
I am trying to setup a Hybrid TV PCI card on a old Pentium III with the latest debian system and to make the zoneminder to work with it.
The tv card is a saa7131e/03/g based model.
It is not autodetected so after hours i ended up to find at least one configuration for the saa7134 that seems to work well with tvtime.
I also created a monitor configuration in zoneminder that seems to work under some cases, where i had before started tvtime. Otherwise i get a black picture in zoneminder with the date-time info in the upper right corner.
Is this normal?
My source is from card's tv-tuner (not from card's video input) because the camera signal is multiplexed in the tv-cable.
So do i need a program like the tvtime to tell the tuner to choose a specific tv channel or not?

thanks in advance....

[markrocker]

Thanks for sharing the such excellent concepts related to the TV tuner. I hope these tips will really help all the members.

[joako]

Yes, that is probably your issue. You need to tell the TV tuner what channel to tune to somehow. I am not sure if this is supported somehow since it's not typical for the cameras to be on modulated coax. When I was setting up my home system I had massive issues with PCI compatibility because I am running it on an HP server (some ML-series tower Celeron 2ghz) so in the meantime while I waited for China to ship me some cards I grabbed some old TV tuner cards and used them but with the svideo and RCA inputs. Think of it this way: the cards use the same chips but on the tv tuner cards there's also a tuner module attached to one of the chip's input lines. There's also i2c bus to communicate with the tuner (e.g.: channel switching)