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TN0013: Lessons learned while installing the "Tevion Model MD 9415 PC-TV-Radio-Karte mit Stereo Sound" This technical note is about what I learned when I installed this TV card in my system under Windows XP and under Linux. History In 2001 I bought a cheap (approx. USD 50) TV card for my PC at the German supermarket chain "Aldi". At this price you have to expect to run into problems, when you want to do things that are not in the manual. About the MD 9415 TV card The German supermarket chain Aldi sold it under the brand name Tevion, and it's called "Model MD 9415". Inside the manual, you also find the company Medion mentioned. The card itself is a PCI card. The three biggest components on the card are:
Getting the card to work under Windows XP I tried to install the Windows 2000 driver that came with the card but it did not work. Fortunately, I found a GPL'd driver called btwincap on the Web which is a generic Windows 2000 / Windows XP WDM driver for pretty much all Bt878 based TV cards. The project's home page is located at http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ After installing this driver, everything worked well. This is a great piece of software, and highly recommended! (I used the following settings: "Lifetec LT9415 TV LR90 Rev.F" (Card=$36), Autodetect (Tuner=$ff), TDA9855 not installed, TV Tuner Does FM: Yes, TV Audio used for FM: No). After a few weeks, I wanted to use my PC as a digital TV recorder. I played around with several programs, and finally settled on ShowShifter, which can be found at http://www.showshifter.com/. If you want to store some recordings for a longer time, you are well-advised to use a standard format which will be around for a few years. Right now the format of choice seems to be MPEG, in its SVCD form. I tried several free encoding packages but didn't get along with them well. I finally settled on Pinnacle Studio 7 from Pinnacle Systems ( http://www.pinnaclesys.com/), because it can create SVCD MPEG files as its final output. I'm not a video expert, and I don't intend to become one. Live is just too short. I've tried out several formats and codecs, and so far I got the best results using ShowShifter for recording files using MJPEG compression. After the recording is done, I have ShowShifter convert the files to MJPEG encoded AVI files. Then I switch to Pinacle Studio, open the AVI files, let it do its scene recognition stuff, drag all the scenes to the final video, and have it write an SVCD compliant MPEG file. Now I only need to find out how I can convince Nero to write real SVCDs. Getting the card to work under Linux On a SuSE 8.0 system, it turns out that you can simply select "Lifetec LT9415TV (LR90 Rev.F)". That's all. In October 2002, all the other software is still in its infancy and cannot be recommended for regular use. Document History First Version: October 05, 2002 Second Version: January 04, 2003: Added settings for BTWincap installation Questions? If you have any questions, please send e-mail to Carsten Kuckuk at . | ||||||||||