[lug] linux tv tuner cards?

[Lee Woodworth]

D. Stimits wrote:
> I'm curious if anyone here has heard of television capture cards which 
> work under linux...but with this twist: Capable of using digital cable, 
> rather than just an analog tuner? Perhaps something PCI, so I can keep 
> using my current video card? It's only a matter of a year or less I 
> think before the local cable starts transmitting digital only (or making 
> digital available on all channels; but not in high definition for basic 
> channels), and the separate digital-to-analog tuners cost around $200 
> each. Unfortunately I'm not finding much, I have a feeling that nobody 
> wants to manufacture such a thing for fear of getting sued. Also I 
> imagine there are problems piping enough bandwidth to the video card 
> over an ordinary PCI bus, so I suspect that whatever solutions there 
> are, they'll be integrated with an expensive high-end video card as well.
The mpeg decode and the real-time color conversions are the heavy
duty compute parts. With a super fast CPU and high I/O bandwidth to
the video buffer (~170MB/s) you might be able to get by w/o
hardware assist for the HD display. It would probably require
an AGP 8X card.

Basic 2D cards that support the xvideo extension can help with the
scaling and color conversion. Might even help with the transfer
to the video buffer. The open source nv driver with an nvidia
FX 5200 (~$60) supports xvideo. the mpeg2dec program can use
the xvideo extension.

> 
> D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net
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