These are my notes on setting up the IVTV driver on an Ubuntu system. The documentation at the IVTV web site is excellent but what I really want is a simple step-by-step specific to Ubuntu so here we go (this will probably also work on Debian).

Go to http://ivtvdriver.org/ and download the source code appropriate for your kernel version (eg, I have kernel 2.6.15 so I download version 0.4.6). Also download the firmware from the firmware page.

You will need to install the kernel-headers for your kernel:

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Compile and install the driver:

$ tar zxvf ivtv-0.4.6.tar.gz

$ cd ivtv-0.4.6/

$ make

$ sudo make install

Then unpack the firmware:

$ cd /lib/firmware/`uname -r`

$ sudo tar zxvf ~/firmware.tar.gz

Finally, start the driver:

$ sudo modprobe ivtv

If all goes well, you should be able to see positive looking messages in your dmesg. You can test the video capture is working by issuing the comand

hexdump -C /dev/video0 | head

- you should see a few lines of hex codes. If it doesn’t work, well this is just a simple step-by-step so you will have to work it out for yourself.