Note: This decribes video-in use, so not video-out use! (Rudolf)

For those who have seen how simplistically beautiful the experience of watching TV in BeOS can be, there is often a dark side to this splendor, configuration.

Tv-in cards in BeOS are well supported with the bt848 chip having native support. However, the documentation side of things is very poor, with little to none floating around on how to configure the tricky task of getting your TV card working blissfully.

This is where this howto comes in, this is a little guide on how to configure your TV card in BeOS so it can be used by one of the many apps for TV on bebits (such as StampTV and my favourite KTV) OR just the plain ol' TV application in /boot/apps included with BeOS for those hardcore BeOS users :D

Getting the video to work on your tv card is pretty straight forward, and it always helps to have a video card that supports overlay(gives a much better quality picture, note in addition you need a TV app that supports overlay such as stamptv, KTV and some other apps, the TV app included with BeOS does not use overlay). You basically configure under the "Hardware Setup" tab in Video Controls, your Tuner Locale, Tuner Brand, Video Format, set each Video Input in the "Input Names" tab to "Tuner" (unless you use a different input such as Svideo). Then try a combination of these settings by trial and error in a manner similar to what I outline below.

Getting the audio to work for TV requires some work, which is fiddly and tedious, but well worth it.

1. Open up the TV application (BeOS Menu on the Deskbar) -> Applications -> TV . You'll see a configuration panel and a window in which TV can be viewed.
2. First I recommend setting all the audio inputs under the "Input Names" tab to "Tuner".
3. Under the "Controls" tab, select the first "Tuner" on the list in the "Audio Input" dropdown menu.
4. Under the "Hardware Setup" tab cycle(selecting each one individually, through the "Audio Mux" values to see if you get any sound. [make sure though that in the Media Preferences Panel, under Audio Settings -> soundcardoutput(e.g. emu10k1 out), that "Line In" is not muted, AND that you have made the suitable conduits for audio to travel from your tv card to your audio card as per indicated by your tv card's manual. ] Note you have to have it on some tv channel to see if you pick up any audio.
5. If cycling through those Audio Mux values hasn't produced any audio, don't fret. Now go back to step 3) and instead of choosing the first "Tuner" on the list choose the second, and follow the process through again, doing so until you have either found audio or have cycled through all 4 inputs on the "Audio Input" dropdown menu.
6. If you still haven't received any audio, double check the precautions in step 4) and try again. If you have received audio, congratulations, all that trial and error has paid off. Note down the successful "Tuner" on the list (either the first, second, third, or fourth) and also note down the successful "Audio Mux" value for future reference.

Well, now you have audio done, here are a few tips and tricks you can make use of in your use of TV in BeOS.

Some of you may wish to have your TV application placed in the same spot all the time on the desktop. This can be accomplished with hey.

Open your TV app of Choice, I use KTV.
1. Change the size of the TV window and position the window as desired on the screen, in a place where you would like it to stay. You can then issue the command from the terminal:
   
   hey KTV get Frame of Window 0
   
   this returns a value such as BRect(579.0, 4.0, 754.0, 123.0) , which you can then use to set the TV application back to that position, anytime it is anywhere other than that position, fixating it in that place, e.g:
   
   hey KTV set Frame of Window 0 to "BRect(579.0, 4.0, 754.0, 123.0)"
2. You can also strip the TV window of it's border:
   
   hey KTV set Look of Window 0 to 19 &
   
   and make it always on top & on all workspaces
   
   hey KTV set Feel of Window 0 to 6 &
3. You can then place this all in a script and use it to launch your tv application perfectly every time by assigning a shortcut in spicykeys to the script:
   
       #!/bin/sh
    /boot/apps/KTV/KTV &
    sleep 1
    hey KTV set Frame of Window 0 to "BRect(579.0, 4.0, 754.0, 123.0)"
    sleep 1
    hey KTV set Look of Window 0 to 19 &
    sleep 1
    hey KTV set Feel of Window 0 to 6
   

Something you may wish to do while watching tv is to quickly mute the TV application during say an adbreak, it is often quite tedious to do this by opening the media preferences panel. Enter quickmute, an application written by unlyrn for this purpose, you can find it here. You run it as thus:

quickmute some_int

Where some_int is a number designating an output source in the media preferences (such as in emu10k1 out). 1 would correspond to master, the next one along is 2, and so on. To mute the audio coming from the TV card we want to mute 4, which is Line In. So by running quickmute 4 we can mute the audio stream, and then running it again, we can unmute the stream. You can setup this in SpicyKeys.