Linux HowTo

The recent versions of VLC require some extra setup for alsa 5.1 surround sound. By default vlc chooses the alsa device 'default'. When you're trying to switch the audio mode to "Surround 5.1", you got the error message VLC Audio output failed: The audio device "surround51" is already in use This can be solved by running vlc from terminal like this vlc --aout alsa --alsa-audio-device surround51 Surround51 is the alsa device you want to play audio with. You can get the list of available alsa audio devices by typing aplay -L in the terminal

If you've recently purchased Compro VideoMate Vista M5F tv tuner card and want to get it working on your linux machine, then you are just in a few steps before you will get this done. I bought this card two weeks ago and finally setup it yesterday. But don't be upset, this will not take so long for you. So lets begin. First check that you card is correctly plugged into the system # lspci -v 04:00.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7131/SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev d1) Subsystem: Compro Technology, Inc. VideoMate T750 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 21 Memory at 90100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K] Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2 Kernel driver in use: saa7134 Kernel modules: saa7134 If you see that then the card is connected and you can continue. On my linux distribution (Archlinux) the card is automatically detected as Compro VideoMate T750 and all required saa7134 modules are loaded. This is not right so ...