Cinergy 250 PCI & Linux

This page explains how to have Terratec Cinergy 250 PCI video card work under Linux. It is done by patching a kernel module.

Thanks to Hermann Pitton for his support in posting this patch to the kernel trunk. It is not yet included in 2.6.35 but should arrive some day.

• Checking that your card is seen
• Patching the kernel
• Watching TV

Checking that your card is seen

Insert your Terratec Cinergy 250 PCI card into your PC, fire it up and check the card is recognized with lspci command, which should output something like that:

02:00.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7133/SAA7135
Video Broadcast Decoder (rev d0)

Patching the kernel

Now download the source of your kernel, and apply the following patch to drivers/media/video/saa7134/saa7134-cards.c (this patch is for kernel 2.6.34 but you can manually add the name_comp1 section to any other version):

    
diff -r 9652f85e688a linux/drivers/media/video/saa7134/saa7134-cards.c
--- a/linux/drivers/media/video/saa7134/saa7134-cards.c	Thu May 27 02:02:09 2010 -0300
+++ b/linux/drivers/media/video/saa7134/saa7134-cards.c	Thu Jul 08 22:15:56 2010 +0200
@@ -2831,11 +2831,15 @@
 			.vmux = 1,
 			.amux = TV,
 			.tv   = 1,
-		},{
+		}, {
+			.name = name_comp1,
+			.vmux = 3,
+			.amux = LINE2,
+		}, {
 			.name = name_svideo,  /* NOT tested */
 			.vmux = 8,
-			.amux = LINE1,
-		}},
+			.amux = LINE2,
+		} },
 		.radio = {
 			.name   = name_radio,
 			.amux   = TV,

This done, rebuild your module and install it:

make modules modules_install

Then reload the module, after unloading it if it was loaded:

rmmod saa7134
modprobe saa7134

Watching TV

I use the card to acquire video from an external Set-Top Box and watch it on the PC; for other usage you might need some tweaking. Here are the last steps:

• Plug your STB to the PC using a SCART-Cinch adapter on the STB, and then:
  
  • for the audio, a Cinch cable between the white and red plugs of the adapter and the audio input of your soundcard
    
  • for the video, the Cinch-Composite (proprietary) cable provided with the Cinergy card, between the yellow plug of the adapter and the Composite input of the video card
• Install and start tvtime (xawtv also works but delivers a less polished image), and check that the image format is on PAL and not SECAM
• Enjoy!