The bttv driver supports many popular and inexpensive capture cards based on the BT878 and BT848 chips. bttv version 0.9.x is included with Linux 2.6 kernels.

tvtime should work fine with this driver. Known issues:

1. NTSC users, if your channels are black-and-white and misnumbered, please see this discussion on our problems page.
2. Before Kernel 2.6.8, bttv is unable to provide VBI data required for decoding NTSC closed captions or XDS information.
3. If you cannot tune to any channels, your card may not be detected by the driver. Please see this discussion on our problems page.
4. If you have a Prolink PixelView card and are experiencing audio problems, please see this discussion on our problems page.
5. If your card has no tuner, please see this warning on our problems page.

The bttv driver supports many popular and inexpensive capture cards based on the BT878 and BT848 chips. bttv version 0.7.x is shipped with Linux 2.4 kernels.

tvtime should work fine with this driver. Known issues:

1. This driver does not support PAL-60.
2. In kernels before 2.4.21, you may need to load bttv with more capture card buffers. Please see this discussion on our problems page.
3. If you cannot tune to any channels, your card may not be detected by the driver. Please see this discussion on our problems page.
4. NTSC users, if your channels are black-and-white and misnumbered, please see this discussion on our problems page.
5. If you have a Prolink PixelView card and are experiencing audio problems, please see this discussion on our problems page.
6. If your card has no tuner, please see this warning on our problems page.

The saa7134 driver supports newer capture cards based on the Philips SAA7134 chip. This driver is included with Linux 2.6 kernels.

tvtime should work fine with this driver. Known issues:

1. If you cannot tune to any channels, your card may not be detected by the driver. Please see this discussion on our problems page.
2. This driver can return I/O errors when there is no signal or a poor signal. These errors are not allowed by the V4L2 standard, and should be fixed in more recent driver versions. These errors will cause tvtime to output warnings to the console, and potentially crash under tvtime 0.9.12.

The cx88 driver supports newer capture cards based on the Connexant 2388x chips. Many capture card vendors are switching to using this chip over the BT878.

The cx88 driver is not yet as stable as either the saa7134 or bttv drivers. tvtime should work well with this driver, but there may be driver bugs which prevent smooth operation. Known issues:

1. This capture card cannot automatically detect whether a station receives audio in PAL-BG or PAL-DK format. If you are receiving PAL-DK channels, you must flag these individually in the tvtime menu. PAL-DK audio mode is not supported in tvtime 0.9.12 and earlier.
2. If you cannot tune to any channels, your card may not be detected by the driver. Please see this discussion on our problems page.

tvtime has been known to work with the rivatv driver in the past, but recently we have had reports that it is broken. If you have more information or reports of either success or failure with this driver, please email me at vektor@dumbterm.net.

Known issues:

1. If you are experiencing poor performance, please see this discussion on our problems page.

tvtime should work with the V4L2 dvb-kernel driver, so long as your card has hardware MPEG2 decoding capability and can provide tvtime with raw video data. Also note that tvtime does not have the ability to change channels on these cards: you must use an external program to control the input to tvtime.

Eric Sellers has written a V4L2 driver for older ATI All-In-Wonder cards. He wrote this about his success with tvtime on September 23rd, 2004:

It seems to work with tvtime... not perfectly of course :) I dont provide enough buffers for tvtime so some of the deinterlace code is disabled, but you can watch tv... for a while, tvtime seems to bring out the bugs in my code :) so it freezes my machine once in a while. Not sure why yet.

Please email me any reports of success with this driver or updates to this information.

The ivtv driver supports cards that provide high quality MPEG2 encoded video. This cards are ideal for PVR systems. However, tvtime has no MPEG2 decoding capabilities or audio playback code, and therefore cannot be used to watch live TV from these cards.

The usbvision driver supports many USB capture devices and webcams, such as the Hauppauge WinTV-USB devices and the Pinnacle Studio PCTV USB devices. We have had reports that the usbvision driver cannot provide frames either at the quality or pixel format required by tvtime, and therefore will not be usable. If you have more information about this driver and tvtime, please me at vektor@dumbterm.net.

The V3TV driver supports the TV input capabilities of the Voodoo 3 3500 cards by 3dfx. While this driver was unmaintained for some time, development seems to have restarted. However, it seems that this driver may not yet support capture, and therefore cannot be used with tvtime. Please contact me at vektor@dumbterm.net if you have new information.

ATI has a line of video cards with video capture capabilities, and the GATOS project develops drivers for these cards which includes km, a kernel module for a Video4Linux interface to the capture components on these cards.

This is just for video cards with capture capabilities, not for the ATI TV Wonder line of capture cards which use the BT878 chip and are supported by the bttv driver.

The Video4Linux interface provided by GATOS is currently unusable with tvtime, and at this point it seems unlikely that they ever will. The problems are:

1. The Video4Linux interface provided by the km driver is nonstandard. It provides at field rate instead of frame rate, and does not seem to provide a way of detecting this. This may require additional code to support it in tvtime.
2. The km driver only supports read() mode, which is currently untested in the tvtime code. If someone could test this out, I would appreciate it.

A user has reported an unsuccessful attempt to use tvtime with a G400 marvel card supported by Matrox Marvel driver project. To quote:

"Its taking 38ms to grab a frame, but the marvel does all its own scaling in hardware (ie not via Xv, well I dont think it does) the anoying thing is that if the hardware scaling is in use Xv cant be used."

"It would be nice if tvtime supported overlay mode so that us marvel users can at least use the 16:9 mode in fullscreen."

I think we may be able to get this card working, but it will take someone with a bit of know-how to figure out what the card expects, and I guess the ability to shut off whatever hardware scaling prevents us from using XVideo.

Once someone tried to use tvtime with the zoran driver that is part of a larger project called mjpegtools. This is an older card, and depending on your PCI configuration, many users with seemingly high powered machines experience extremely poor performance. Please read this email extract from the driver authors.