Gentoo Linux IVTV Guide

1.  Introduction

About IVTV

There are many television tuner cards that work on a GNU/Linux system, thanks to the efforts of Video4Linux and DVB hackers. The Hauppauge brand of capture cards vary slightly from the group, in both features and requirements to setup.

Many of the Hauppauage boards, supported by the IVTV drivers, have support for things like MPEG hardware encoding. Normally a video card passes a raw video stream to the computer for processing by software, but IVTV supported cards can directly capture and encode the raw video and audio to MPEG2 and MP3, respectively. The advantage to this approach is that users can build low-powered, low-profile systems that do not need a lot of processing power to act as a multimedia device for recording.

Supported hardware

The list of hardware supported by the IVTV drivers is too long to mention here, and is already covered in detail on the project homepage at http://www.ivtvdriver.org/.

Until recently, the IVTV drivers needed to be built and compiled as external modules. With the 2.6.22 version release of the Linux kernel, the drivers have moved into the kernel directly, and can be compiled

2.  Installation

IVTV and Linux kernel versioning

Choosing the version of which IVTV ebuild to emerge is a matter of choosing the kernel version you want to run onto your system, and then to find the accompanying drivers that will build against that release.

As of version 2.6.22 of the linux kernel, the drivers are included in the mainstream code, and you can select the modules directly from there. IVTV drivers are also in the portage tree for kernels all the way back to 2.6.15.

You can know which branch of IVTV to install by matching it with the compatible kernel branch.

In each case of both kernel and IVTV drivers, any sub version of the drivers will also work. As an example, you could use versions 0.10.0 through 0.10.5 of the IVTV drivers with any kernel between 2.6.18 through 2.6.21.7. As long as the major versions match on both, the drivers will install.

As a matter of choosing the correct version, portage will stop and display an error if you've selected the wrong branch.

Kernel Configuration and Modules

Before emerging the ivtv package, you will need to setup your kernel with the correct configuration before it can load the drivers. Since there are two options, having the drivers in the kernel with 2.6.22 and greater, or compiling them separately, we'll look at the configurations individually.

Linux >=2.6.22

Since the IVTV drivers are now in the kernel, we'll select them, along with the other drivers it depends on.

First, load the I2C drivers. These are found under the Device Drivers menu.

<M> I2C support  --->

--- I2C support
<M>   I2C device interface

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