If the box freezes hard with bttv ...=====================================It might be a bttv driver bug.  It also might be bad hardware.  It alsomight be something else ...Just mailing me "bttv freezes" isn't going to help much.  This READMEhas a few hints how you can help to pin down the problem.bttv bugs---------If some version works and another doesn't it is likely to be a driverbug.  It is very helpful if you can tell where exactly it broke(i.e. the last working and the first broken version).With a hard freeze you probably doesn't find anything in the logfiles.The only way to capture any kernel messages is to hook up a serialconsole and let some terminal application log the messages.  /me usesscreen.  See Documentation/serial-console.txt for details on settingup a serial console.Read Documentation/oops-tracing.txt to learn how to get any usefulinformation out of a register+stack dump printed by the kernel onprotection faults (so-called "kernel oops").If you run into some kind of deadlock, you can try to dump a call tracefor each process using sysrq-t (see Documentation/sysrq.txt).  ksymoopswill translate these dumps into kernel symbols too.  This way it ispossible to figure where *exactly* some process in "D" state is stuck.I've seen reports that bttv 0.7.x crashes whereas 0.8.x works rock solidfor some people.  Thus probably a small buglet left somewhere in bttv0.7.x.  I have no idea where exactly, it works stable for me and alot ofother people.  But in case you have problems with the 0.7.x versions youcan give 0.8.x a try ...hardware bugs-------------Some hardware can't deal with PCI-PCI transfers (i.e. grabber => vga).Sometimes problems show up with bttv just because of the high load onthe PCI bus. The bt848/878 chips have a few workarounds for knownincompatibilities, see README.quirks.Some folks report that increasing the pci latency helps too,althrought I'm not sure whenever this really fixes the problems oronly makes it less likely to happen.  Both bttv and btaudio have ainsmod option to set the PCI latency of the device.Some mainboard have problems to deal correctly with multiple devicesdoing DMA at the same time.  bttv + ide seems to cause this sometimes,if this is the case you likely see freezes only with video and hard diskaccess at the same time.  Updating the IDE driver to get the latest andgreatest workarounds for hardware bugs might fix these problems.other-----If you use some binary-only yunk (like nvidia module) try to reproducethe problem without.IRQ sharing is known to cause problems in some cases.  It works justfine in theory and many configurations.  Neverless it might be worth atry to shuffle around the PCI cards to give bttv another IRQ or makeit share the IRQ with some other piece of hardware.  IRQ sharing withVGA cards seems to cause trouble sometimes.  I've also seen funnyeffects with bttv sharing the IRQ with the ACPI bridge (andapci-enabled kernel).