hello all who have unique opinions!!

Another question....


I am building a new box soon based on the Asus k8v se deluxe mobo from what i have heard no linux kernel supports the onboard audio, so i know i wil have to get a card for a bit or try to make the onboard sound work myself...unless someone knows where i can get the appropriate drivers...

But the real question i have is/ what all you people think the best most widely supported tv capture card and programs to make the card work under linux.

i am looking to be able to watch tv (obviously) and record it on my machine!

any ideas and support any of yous can provide is awesome!

PS. ive read the other post about tv tuner problems... but im trying to skip the whole..."ive got this problem someone help" thread that is out there on this subject, trying to do the reaserch first, so there are fewer problems!

i haev mandrakelinux 10 and a MSI K7N2G-L and my onboard sound works flawlessly. but recording is a nother relm of darkness

I'm very satisfied with my saa7134-based "Pinnacle PCTV Stereo", at least for watching French TV. But due to ALSA issues, I wasn't able to record so far. Now ALSA is OK, but I did not try recording again, yet, so I can't tell...

Yves.

I think just about anyone will work but if you pick one thats popular then you will have less problems and more answers... have a look at the hcl on here.

Yeah, just about any card will work. I got the very cheapest one I could find. I think mine's a Wavetech. It was only $11!

TVTime's the best program I've found for watching Live TV, but I've never found a good way to record TV. I tried installing MythTV, but the setup was far too complicated, and I could never figure it out. I tried several other, much simpler ones, but they never worked right. One of them thought I didn't have tcron installed when I did, and therefore wouldn't let me set a time to record. I even tried ffmpeg to record, but the sound and audio were nearly impossible to sync properly. I found that if I shrank down the picture size to, I think it was, 480x360, or somewhere around there, I could get the audio and video in sync, but who wants to watch TV at that resoultion? It would only be good to watch on a PDA. So, if you can find a good recording program, that's easy to install, please share.

On the plus side, when I watch TV on my computer in Windows, it never, ever works right, and I can't even find a decent free program to just watch live TV for windows. Further proof the Linux kicks Windows rear-end!

I use xawdecode with a plugins package it can decode nagra and record you can even choose the codecs and has teletext... it is REALLY cool

But a good tip I couldn´t get it to compile there was somthing strange but I found a script written specificly to install it in slackware and it worked like a charm.

im planning to maybe change my distro to slackware could you ( jimdaworm ) share where you found the material relating to installing the program?

mplayer comes with a video capture program that is very efficient and very fast called mencoder. MythTV uses mencoder for capturing. mencoder is efficient and fast that my 700 MHz Athlon system can capture using divx (video) and mp3 (audio). At the same time I can play back the video and use my computer with out any frame drops. In Windows, my computer just drops frames.

The instructions for MythTV is very thorough, but developers should stay away from QT and use something more common and light weight like GTK or wxWidgets. QT programs never compile on my system even though the program wants an old version of QT than I have.

Like everybody said just about any capture card will do. Do some homework what chipset it uses and match it to what chip that Video 4 Linux is compatible.

You can not control what tuner brand and model is on the capture card. You have to cross your fingers and hope the tuner will work. Usually the tuner will work.

In Windows, there is a program called dscaler. Tvtime developers uses some code from dscaler that made it popular. There is virtualdub. It should by now work with WDM and Video 4 Windows drivers, but it only works with Video 4 Windows drivers. Neither matches the quality, speed, efficiency, and the weight of the program in Linux.

Changing to another distribution does not matter. You will still have the same problem unless you know how to fix it.

I can't say if any chipset is OK. But I'm fairly sure I've never read that anyone could make a "WinTV Go" work on Linux...
That's why I chose the PCTV equivalent.

Yves.

Hey Forced2Morph sorry I didn´t see you weren´t using slackware (I usually only post in the slackware forum )

I am sure Electro has some great points I think can use up to about 50 percent of my cpu when its encoding in xvid (I think it was xvid) and I have a Athlon @ 3200+ but I personally tried for a while to get Mythtv installed and found it really complicated... more complicated than vdr+xine+sc plugins for my dvb tv tuner card (digital satellite).

But from what I have seen Myth tv is really pretty looking I would say you just have to try stuff and find out out you like (Like linux dists)

Good luck

I have WinTV Go. It works fine. I do not know why people are having problems setting it up. Usually novice users do not know what they are doing so they give up. When kernel version 2.6.x came out, almost everybody had problems with it.

I'm glad the WinTV Go is OK. I stand corrected Things have changed since I had to make my own choice... (saa7134 was all new then in Linux, but already 95% of low-price cards available)

Yves.

thanx for all the opinions, anyone else with preferances that they like

Hey Forced2Morph if you want to install xawdecode just download it I had problems with the latest 1.9.3 but 1.9.2 worked fine and then use the following plugin. I am not sure about its legality

http://cricrac.free.fr/download/xawd...n-1.4.8.tar.gz