channel switching

Hi all,

I started using avicap to recode my old videotapes after a long and
painful experience with other tools on my linux box: only avifile
gives perfect AV sync, and I can record 48000 Hz video (for some
reason my audio card will make a hissing sound when playing a 44100).

Anyway, I have these two issues, a small one first:

(1) I can't switch TV channels in avicap. "Xawtv stations" menu item
    is available but when I select a channel the only thing that
    happens is the title bar is updated with the channel name, not the
    picture.

(2) More important is this. When I'm recording from a video camera,
    and there is a several second long gap in the recording on the
    tape, avicap will, at the end of the gap, switch to a TV channel,
    while continuing recording. I couldn't get avi file split or merge
    work because AV-sync issues (transcode didn't work for me either),
    so for now I would like to just convert the whole tape to the AVI
    format.

I wonder if there's a simple explanation to (1) and a quick fix for
(2).

Thanks in advance

-- 
Viktor