I've been tweaking so much on the HD/ATSC side of my setup, that I've put off this issue for a while...

I have an old WinTV 401/dbx card in my BE, and for the past couple of months I can only see programs in B&W. It seems like the color is gone, or the card just isn't decoding the signals properly.

I did some searching on the board and the mythtv-users list, but still didn't find any posts having a similar problem.

If someone here has seen this, is it correctable, or will I have to search for another tuner card?

This can mean several different things. Some of the easier ones to fix are:

- Wrong frequency set - if the card isn't tuning properly you can get B&W.

- Wrong card/tuner type detected - many of the older bttv cards don't auto-detect well and you need to specify the card and/or tuner type for them to work properly.

It could also just be borked...

A night of tinkering has got me to thinking that something within MythTV is borking the 401 color capture....

I tried hooking up a USDTV STB (The old WalMart ATSC tuner box) to the S-Vid hookup, and I was still getting black and white. Ugh...

After moving the card around in the PC to see if different PCI slots might be the problem...I still saw B & W.

Then it hit me... Try 'tvtime!' Did an 'apt-get install tvtime' and lo and behold, it pulls in beautiful COLOR from both the tuner and S-Vid. Why Myth can't do the same is odd. Maybe I should try a SVN build?

One sort of off topic issue I've discovered: I can't seem to capture the audio from the S-Vid/Line In within Myth... I tinkered with tvtime, and there it'll work IF I route the line out of the 401 card to the line in on the sound card. Is anyone capturing the external audio through the btaudio module?

I'll stick by my original diagnoses, and with two different cards showing the same behavior I'm leaning much more strongly towards "wrong frequency set".

MythTV and R5F27 work for other folks using analog frame grabber (aka BTTV, aka YUV, aka "software encoder") cards, so the evidence is pointing strongly towards simple misconfiguration. Go visit the http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=BlackScreenWatchingTV wiki page and follow the configuration walk through there.

tjc,

There isn't TWO different cards, I'm just using the 401 with the external ATSC STB using the svideo/line-in on the same card. I did this to see if an external video source would show the same problem by bypassing the internal tuner. I was hoping, in a sense, that if I fed in some color video, it would show up as color and suggest that the 401's tuner was having the color problem. How would a frequency error mess up an external video source?

I'll spend some time checking my Myth setup, and I'm looking for any oddities there. If I spot something, I'll post back.

Still trying to figure it out.

ok! tjc was sort of correct! Yeah! Thanks for convincing me to re-examine the entire setup.

By going through the entire setup sequence, I noticed that I had made a change on the initial backend setup (via mythtv-setup) and changed the TV Format value to ATSC. I changed it back to NTSC, and Myth now captures from the WinTV card in COLOR! It must have been months ago, when I was working on the system without the WinTV card installed.

Even though I have an ATSC card in the system, I'll assume that Myth needs this setting to help encode streams from older frame buffer PVR cards.

I'm scratching my head on that one, it wasn't a true frequency change, the setting for the frequency table below the format option was set to us-bcast.

I'm still searching for the correct setup for digital audio capture on the external input. I'm hoping to use that input for my old VCR so I can capture some old tapes that I have.