I am interested in setting up a cheap Freevo box. I am always missing my favorite shows, and this seems like a good way to get them and record them and even have them on disc for the future.

I am definately using Ubuntu as I have developed a strong love for it. I looked at MythTV and Freevo, but I think I am going with Freevo. It seems to be pretty straightforward and the apt install (I am a noob, I know) is much better for me with my current skill level.

So, I need to find a compatible TV tuner... I looked all over Freevo's sight, but cannot find a list of supported chipsets anywhere! Does anyone know what chipsets are supported? Which chipsets will give me the least hassle and the best quality?

Price is a main consideration, so I don't want to go above $50US for this.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Hi,

I'm using a cheap (£30 in UK) SAA7134-based analogue TV card. It works well with Ubuntu 5.04, although I did have to mess with module options slightly..

The card itself isn't spectacular - no hardware Mpeg encoding etc, but for the money it's alright - picture quality is perfectly acceptable. The card is fitted to a fast machine (3GHz Athlon / 512MB RAM) - if you're running anything less than about 1.5GHz, you might want to see if you can lay your hands on a better card with hardware acceleration - takes the strain off the main processor, although $50 might be pushing it..

I'm using MythTV by the way - it's available in the Hoary multiverse archive. Installing wasn't too bad, but I did run into one or two strange configuration issues that I haven't seen when installing (from source) on either Mandrake or SuSE. But it's working well now. Haven't tried Freevo in a while - I like Myth's client / server architecture

I am running a 3.01GHz Celeron D and 1GB of RAM, so I am not worried about slowness really.

No hardware MPEG encoding... does that mean it just passes it off to the CPU?

I found some with the Phillips SAA1730 chipset, is that comparable to the 1734 in compatibility?

One more thing... did you get MythTV off of apt with that repository? I can't handle much more than apt or deb packages right now, though I am working towards more...

A quick Google search on mythtv debian packages came up with this web page with packages built by Math Zimmerman who is a Debian Developer so they should be good to go.. As far as the card to use goes you should look at the Mythtv website and see what they recommend that is usually the best idea.

You should be looking at the HCL database in this forum. There are a bunch of video capture cards that are supported in Linux. Some cards require kernel version 2.6.10 or later. I have a SAA7133 based capture card and it gives very, very good captures. My slow computer, a 700 MHz AMD Athlon with 512 MB of SDRAM using a Hauppauge WinTV Go, captures with no frame drops while loading OpenOffice, browsing the web, or watching the live recording. I used mplayer mencoder, written BASH scripts, and cron to record TV shows. I can not figure out why my Pentium 4 that has much, much faster hardware but it can not do the same with the SAA7133 video capture card.

BTW, right now it is getting down to the barrel to a few video captures that are not supported by Linux because video capture card business is very slow.