Utilities and or preferences for bt 848 chipset video cards?

I have a Hauppauge Analog video pci card which uses the BT848 chipset. It works out of the box - sort of. I want to use it to convert all my old analog footage to digital. I can get it to play with xawtv, but xawtv won't record (create a video file). I can't figure out what the error xawtv returns means "error: {init}". I can open the card with lives, but only to the default input which is ntsc analog broadcast. There are advance preferences which allow me to change the inputs, but I get blue screen, static, or what looks like wrong standard (pal or secam). I would like to set the card's default input to ntsc analog composite video. There's a way to get the card to tell me what input that is, but I forgot it. then I think I just need to know where I find the configuration file for the card itself. Either that or a fix for xawtv so it will record the video.