Saa713x devices

Introduction

TV cards based on the saa713x chips are well supported. The picture quality is typically high, and the sound can be taken directly from the TV card or through a patch cable to your sound card. On the text capture front, teletext is supported. The only element still lacking is full support for closed captioning under NTSC; cf. a failed attempt.

For an excellent guide, see Gentoo wiki's HARDWARE saa7134.

Installation

Avermedia

As described in AverTV 305/307 linux user guide, the following cards are supported

• AVerTV 305

• AVerTV Studio 305

• AVerTV 307

• AVerTV Studio 307

Lifeview

FlyVideo3000FM NTSC

 lspci -vvv: 0000:02:0a.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA713X Audio+video broadcast decoder (rev 10)
             Subsystem: Unknown device 5169:0138

This card has the saa7133HL-v101 chip.

Use card 2 in the /usr/src/linux-2.6.12-rc2/Documentation/video4linux/CARDLIST.saa7134. Versions of FlyVideo 3000 are shipped with different tuners; to find yours, grep on the card and your television standard to pull up relevant alternatives:

  cat /usr/src/linux/Documentation/video4linux/CARDLIST.tuner | grep Philips | grep NTSC

For the NTSC tuner, I found 17 was the right one. I had to reboot to reset the tuner; modprobe didn't do it. Boot with this in /etc/modules:

  saa1734 card=2 tuner=17 oss=1

The "oss=1" will create /dev/dsp1 and /dev/mixer1, and is added to take advantage of this card's ability to use PCI audio transfer -- that is to say, you can get the audio straight off the card, without needing a patch cable to your sound card. For detailed instructions, see Gentoo's saa7134 wiki.

In brief, you use

  aumix -d /dev/mixer1 -I

to set the recording channel to 1 and then use something like this:

  mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video1:fps=30000/1001:chanlist=us-cable:audiorate=32000:
  adevice=/dev/dsp1:input=0:amode=1:normid=4 -ffourcc DIVX -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq 
  -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 -endpos 60 -o output.avi

This gives me stereo audio with high-quality video. I found that if I included "-of mpeg" to create a true mpeg stream, the audio got delayed -- there are no sync problems with the avi file.

You can also use transcode:

  transcode -x v4l2,v4l2 -M 2 -i /dev/video$DEV -p /dev/dsp1 -e 32000,16,2 -y ffmpeg -F mpeg4 
  -c 00:30 -g 640x480 -f 29.970,4 -I 1 -u 1024 -Q 3 -E 32000,16,2 --lame_preset medium -o output.avi

Note the "-e 32000,16,2", letting transcode know about the parameters of the audio stream from the saa7134 card. The files produced in this manner are almost twice as large as the ones produced by the mencoder command above, but show significantly less pixillation. CPU utilization is also about double.

The only disappointment with this card is that so far, I've been unable to get closed captioning to work. Here is the record of my failed attempt.