i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

The Kworld PVR-TV 305u (video only) now works fine using TV Time Television in Linux. Sleuthing out the solution was an adventure and an education -- especially with respect to yet more evilly stuff from Microsoft.

...

I had previously loaded everything conceivably related to analog video feeds that I could find in YAST. So, I cannot write a worthwhile tutorial, since I do not know precisely what I did. But, I have some hints for you, if you are trying to make one of these things work. First, you need the em28xx driver package for the "video4linux" or v4l system. I don't recall if I actually found it in Yast. You want v4l and v4l2 out of YAST.

The final piece of the puzzle is the xc3028-v27.fw firmware, as disclosed by running a "dmesg" command in a root console.

But, no project is ever complete. Sound does not work (but I'm not going to worry about this as I can retrieve sound from the digital>analog box I am using and feed it through the mike input.

Interestingly, I for a short time (as described in my prior post) I had VLC running in WindowsXP and it worked quite well. In linux, however, VLC is giving me a postage stamp sized playback that deteriorates badly when zoomed to full screen. Whereas, the TV Time Television software is doing the entire job quite well.

But -- no video recorder at the moment. So, as I say, no project is ever complete.

Now, about Microsoft. About 3 years ago, my main computer (which is the one I am presently using for the video) died an untimely death. And, in my various blogs and notes, I have attributed this to a graphics card issue on the hp ZD7000. Which may still be the case, or part of the case.

At the time, I "determined" the problem was a hardware issue, due to the fact that the computer would randomly shut off in BOTH windows and linux. At first I thought it was a windows only problem, but then the behavior occurred in linux as well.

For a long time, I did not use the computer for anything, but now I have found various purposes for it. And, notably it has been running flawlessly in linux.

Even somewhat more strangely, the Nvidia linux drivers now load and work (to some degree -- no compositing). And the reason I report this as "strangely" is that for quite awhile the Nvidia drivers did not work. They had been left as "obsolete" and unmaintained. But more recently there was a change in the packages and they now load and run; plus I get the Nvidia splash screen at video startup.

You are wondering what this has to do with Microsoft. Well, as the problem I originally consider to be hardware death has proven to be rather premature reporting (computer still runs so long as it is not running Windows). If not hardware, then what?

I had given up on getting the Kworld device to work in Linux, so I tried to run WindowsXP -- and oddly enough (and for reasons I do not know) it actually loaded and ran. Long enough, that is, to install 46 updates, including SP3. At which point, it would no longer boot as it was now back to the BSOD while attempting to load the agp440.sys driver.

Back to Google. Aha! This is a known problem in the Microsoft knowledgebase. It is also an oft-lamented problem in forum after forum. Which is to say, Microsoft knowingly crippled perfectly good computers with its software updates.

Microsoft claims the solution is to disable the agp440.sys driver, which will allegedly cause the computer to default to VGA drivers. But, how would you know this in a timely, useful fashion? It's taken me three years to find out ... And, of course, caused me to replace my computer because I could not do my work. Which inflicted Vista on me, which forced me to convert to linux.

And then, one needs to have the "repair" disk to disable agp440.sys, which I do not have at the moment. And, then again, many users report this doesn't solve the problem anyway. Oh, and you are supposed to contact the computer manufacturer for a BIOS update. Which, assuming it was not an obsolete product (meaning vendor has no incentive to write an updated BIOS), would require being able to actually boot the machine, I imagine.

Are you kidding me? What kind of trade practice involves knowingly and secretly crippling thousands of computers without telling the users you are doing so? While, in fact, purporting to be providing "support" and "critical updates".

So, as I say, the Kworld now runs on this "obsolete" and crippled HP Pavilion ZD7000 -- which btw, is running just fine (but only in linux).