[lug] video4linux cardlists

[steve at badcheese.com]

Here's what I know about the Hauppage cards:

They all have good support under linux.  They're a popular choice, so many 
developers have been able to work the bugs out of them.  I have several of 
them.  I have the entry-level card that doesn't do any hardware 
compression.  I have the PCI hardware-encoding card and the USB hardware 
encoder "PVR" model.

NOTE: The hardware encoders will encode with a codec that I can only play 
back.  I can't use any software transcoder with the hardware-encoded file. 
The cheap-o 878-based cards with no hardware encoding will encode to 
anything (avirec or other software will handle it).  It takes much more 
CPU power to encode using this card (800Mhz machine is not powerful enough 
to do 29.97 FPS @ 640x480 with very low-grade compression, raw will work 
if your HD is fast enough).  However, using this card and the 
'choose-your-own' compression, it's possible to do offline transcoding to 
divx if you want.

I did this for a number of years.  I tried mythTV and lots of other 
solutions to put my favorite TV shows on disk or DVD.  I tried lots of 
other options and my current method for doing this is using the Tivo 
software since the Hauppage PVR software and MythTV kinda suck:

The Tivo Solution:
Tivo records things like normal (wife can use it too, so she can ask me to
     dump one of her shows if it's on the Tivo)
Use Tivo Desktop to move video to a windows machine with a big harddrive
Use tivodecode to decode the file to mpeg1 (doesn't work with DirecTivo)
Use transcoding software (VirtualDub-MPEG1 in batch mode) to convert to
     DivX

I have a cygwin bash script to do it all automatically on my windows 
machine if you're interested.  I could do it all under linux if I had the 
tivo-server stuff set up but I haven't had the time to set it up and 
fiddle with it yet.

- Steve

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

> Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 08:18:16 -0600
> From: Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>
> Reply-To: "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List"
>     <lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
> To: "Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List"
>     <lug at lug.boulder.co.us>
> Subject: Re: [lug] video4linux cardlists
> 
> On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 06:32 -0600, Stephen Queen wrote:
>> Does anyone have suggestions for available TV-Tuner/Capture Cards?
>
> Try here:
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Video_capture_cards
>
>

-- 
EMAIL: (h) steve at badcheese.com  WEB: http://badcheese.com/~steve