I have installed 8.10 with KDE 4.2 on my ASUS F3J Notebook which has an ATI Radeon X2300 video card. To my surprise my ASUS My Cinema U3000 Mini DVB TV dongle was identified by Kaffeine and I could tune into most of the local Digital TV channels. My problems started when I tried to view the TV. The video and sound worked from 5 to 60 seonds and then the system crashed. The top and bottom half of the TV image was a different colour. The only way I was able to recover was to hold down the power button. After numerous reboots and testing with various options, I found the only way I could reliably use Kaffeine to view Digital TV was a follows:
1. On System Settings > Desktop, Cancel "Enable desktop effects" (It does work to some extent with the desktop effects enabled but spurious video artifacts are removed if disabled.)
2. After Kaffeine is started, the very first action it switch the audio and video drivers.
a. Go to Settings > xine Engine Parameters > audio. Change the driver from say "auto" to "alsa" > apply. I find it necessary to switch between these drivers each time I start Kaffeine. I found no performance difference between using "auto" or "alsa"
b. Next I select video and change the driver from say "auto" to "xv" > apply. If it is on "xv" I change it to "auto".
After this is done, I can then watch TV without any problems. For the above to work, I have used asoundconf to define my default speaker which allows me to change between auto and alsa.
On my 8.04 system I had to download software from http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb followed by make etc. This had to be done after each kernel update and Kaffeine with the Tv dongle never worked as well as on my notebook.
I hope that I do not have to do this when I change to 9.04. Up to this stage, I am quite happy with KDE 4.2 but it still has a few rough edges and applications that do not work.
NoWorries
1. On System Settings > Desktop, Cancel "Enable desktop effects" (It does work to some extent with the desktop effects enabled but spurious video artifacts are removed if disabled.)
2. After Kaffeine is started, the very first action it switch the audio and video drivers.
a. Go to Settings > xine Engine Parameters > audio. Change the driver from say "auto" to "alsa" > apply. I find it necessary to switch between these drivers each time I start Kaffeine. I found no performance difference between using "auto" or "alsa"
b. Next I select video and change the driver from say "auto" to "xv" > apply. If it is on "xv" I change it to "auto".
After this is done, I can then watch TV without any problems. For the above to work, I have used asoundconf to define my default speaker which allows me to change between auto and alsa.
On my 8.04 system I had to download software from http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb followed by make etc. This had to be done after each kernel update and Kaffeine with the Tv dongle never worked as well as on my notebook.
I hope that I do not have to do this when I change to 9.04. Up to this stage, I am quite happy with KDE 4.2 but it still has a few rough edges and applications that do not work.
NoWorries
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