No tvtime output

[ReesAcheson]

I cannot get anything from tvtime. I am trying to capture video from a VCR.

I recently installed a Hauppauge Impact VCB Video Capture Board running under Redhat el5. lspci recognizes it and a /dev/video0 appears. Typing cat /dev/video0 produces a stream of "?" while the VCR is playing.
Typing: $tvtime -v produces the following output:
Running tvtime 1.0.2.
Reading configuration from /etc/tvtime/tvtime.xml
Reading configuration from /home/rees/.tvtime/tvtime.xml
cpuinfo: CPU Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.53GHz, family 15, model 4, stepping 1.
cpuinfo: CPU measured at 2527.322MHz.
$

I do not know what to do next. Any suggestions?

[waterhead]

I doubt very much that Red Hat has the drivers needed to capture video. You would be much better off using a distro like Fedora. It has things like that enabled in the kernel.

Even with Fedora, I would recommend installing the latest drivers. So you can do that with Red Hat too. Download and compile the latest drivers from the LinuxTV.org repository. You first must install Mercurial, then go to this site:

LinuxTV.org - CVS and Mercurial access

You will download the source using this command.

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/dvb-apps

Then compile it according to the instructions.

EDIT: My research tells me that this uses the bt878 chip, and driver of the same name. See card # 143 on this page:
v4l-dvb: linux/Documentation/video4linux/CARDLIST.bttv@dba0b6fae413
Bttv devices (bt848, bt878) - LinuxTVWiki

[ReesAcheson]

Thank you for your suggestions. I followed them but I was still unable to get tvtime to display the card's input. However, in the process I latched on to using xawtv to view and capture the VCR's output. This worked. I do not know why tvtime does not work for me but xawtv did. But thank you again for your directions. The web-sites mentioned helped.