Development: How to add support for a device

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First you should find, how your card identify yourself on pci (just lspci and lspci -vn). This give you type of main decoder chip

Next, you should try to identify tuner chips that your card uses. There can be tuner chip, demodulator or both hidden in metallic box connected directly to antenna input. Often tuner type is printed under sticker.

You can find a lot of cards on http://bttv-gallery.de - very useful resource about cards identification.

Another useful place to look is windows drivers. They often contains a lot of information about cards hardware.


After that you should download latest v4l cvs and search for that or similar card. Probably something like your card is already supported but has another name. Otherwise, you can look on similar entries and fill entry for new card. For bttv chip you should correct bttv-cards.c and bttv.h, for cx88 - cx88-cards.c and cx88.h, for saa - saa7134-cards.c and saa7134.h

guide about addition of remote can be found here Remote_controllers. Before writing the patch please doublecheck if there is no such keys in v4l sources already.

Card works - that's cool. You are ready to send patch to video4linux mailing list.


If your card is missing on bttv-gallery, please, send the following info to Gunther Mayer <gunther.mayer () gmx ! net>.


Your contribution will help to improve open source support! Because there are many cards and variations by different vendors, the developers need _your_ help to get it all supported.

1st priority:

  • picture of the card, the card backside (high resolution pics if feasible)
  • lspci -vn

further information:

  1. picture of remote control (if applicable) and of original package
  2. list of chips
  3. list of input connectors
  4. printings on PCB, printings on stickers on the card
  5. lspci -v and lspci -vn
  6. "dmesg" when loading the modules
  7. if feasible "eeprom" output (from bttv tools)
  8. if feasible "*.INF" files from the Windows Driver CD
  9. exact tuner type (possibly this is hidden under the vendor sticker)
  10. exact model name and model number from package
  11. in which country do you live/ in which country this card was bought
  12. which application(s) did you use to test your setup ?
  13. If some parts of your card seem to work, describe exactly what you did and what you see/hear now.

Even parts of this info will be very helpful!