which is what you could have used had you not known the manufacturer's name for the card.
The file named Modules.conf, located in the same directory, offers the following example of information to place in the /etc/modules.conf file:
# i2c
alias char-major-89 i2c-dev
options i2c-core i2c_debug=1
options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1
# bttv
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 bttv
options bttv card=2 radio=1
options tuner debug=1
All you need do is enter this information into /etc/modules.conf and change the value for card=2 to card=64 to match your hardware. You can delete the reference to the radio card (radio=2) because there isn't one and leave the other values alone. Then you must execute
# depmod -a
to rebuild the modules dependency list so that all the modules are loaded automatically. When finished, all you need do is execute
# modprobe bttv
and your TV card should be fully functional. All the correct modules will be automatically loaded every time you reboot. Fedora is clever enough to detect and configure a supported TV card that is present during installation.
Other useful documentation can be found in /usr/src/linux- 2.6/Documentation/_video4linux. After you have identified a driver for a device, it does not hurt to look at the source code for it because so little formal documentation exists for many drivers; much of it is in the source code comments.
The development of support for TV cards in Linux has coalesced under the Video4Linux project. The Video4Linux software provides support for video capture, radio, and teletext devices in Fedora.
Video Formats
Fedora recognizes a variety of video formats. The formats created by the MPEG group, Apple, and Microsoft dominate, however. At the heart of video formats are the codecs — the encoders and decoders of the video and audio information. These codecs are typically proprietary, but free codecs do exist. Here is a list of the most common video formats and their associated file extensions:
> .mpeg —The MPEG video format; also known as .mpg
> .qt — The QuickTime video format from Apple
> .mov — Another QuickTime video format
> .avi — The Windows audio visual format
An RPM that provides a Divx codec for Linux can be found at http://www.freshrpms.net/. Divx is a patented MPEG-4 video codec that is the most widely used codec of its type. It allows for compression of MPEG-2 video by a factor of 8. See http://www.divx. com/ for more information.
The GetCodecs application is a Python script with a GUI interface that downloads, installs, and configures your Fedora system with multimedia codecs not provided by Fedora, such as MP3, Divx, and DVD codecs. The script can be obtained from http://sourceforge.net/projects/getcodecs/.
If you need to convert video from one format to another, you use encoder applications called ppmtompeg, which encodes MPEG-1 video), but you can find them at http://www.freshrpms.net/ or another online source (see the 'Reference' section at the end of this chapter).
Viewing Video in Linux
Because of the patent and licensing issues mentioned earlier, the capability to play video files has been removed from Fedora. This functionality can be restored if you install the full version of the applications described in this section from FreshRPMs at http://www.freshrpms.net/. There you can find multimedia applications such as Ogle, Xine, AlsaPlayer, Gstreamer, Grip, Mplayer, VCDImager, VideoLAN-client, Xmms, and Zapping.
You can use Linux software to watch TV, save individual images (take snapshots) from a televised broadcast, save a series of snapshots to build animation sequences, or capture video, audio, or both. The following sections describe some of the ways in which you can put Linux multimedia software to work for you.
The noatun viewer is provided with Fedora to use as an embedded viewer in the Konqueror browser. noatun is set up as the default association for the video file formats it plays. Open a video file in Konqueror or Nautilus, and the video is shown in the viewer if it is supported. The viewer provides basic Start, Stop, and Fast-Forward VCR-type functions.
You can watch MPEG and DVD video with Xine. Xine is a versatile and popular media player that is not included with Fedora. Xine is used to watch AVI, QuickTime, Ogg, and MP3 files (the latter is disabled in Fedora).
The Macromedia Flash plug-in for the Mozilla browser is a commercial multimedia application that isn't provided with Fedora, but many people find it useful. Macromedia Flash enables you to view Flash content at websites that support it. The Mozilla plug-in can be obtained from http://macromedia.mplug.org/. Both .rpm and .tar.gz files are provided.
Having trouble with the Macromedia Flash plug-in for Mozilla? Just manually copy the files flashplayer.xpt and libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/firefox- 2.0.0.x/plugins, where x is the latest point release for Firefox (2.0.0.4 at the time of writing). An .rpm file for Flash that should install without problems is available from http://macromedia.mplug.org/.
Another interesting video viewer application is MPlayer (not provided by Fedora), a movie player for Linux. MPlayer can use Win32 codecs and it supports a wider range of video formats than Xine, including Divx and some RealMedia files. MPlayer also uses some special display drivers that support Matrox, 3Dfx, and Radeon cards and can make use of some hardware MPEG decoder boards for better MPEG decoding. Look for Fedora pack ages at http://www.mplayerhq.hu; a Win32 codec package is also available, as well as other codec packages and a GUI interface.
