Hi all,

Can anyone recommend or suggest a high-quality analogue video capture card for linux? I'm looking for something that will give good performance and full (PAL I) frame rate (25 fps). Currently I have two ways of capturing video: An old BT8x8 video card (which gives only low quality and frame-drops above 352x288). In another system I have a Matrox G400TV which does do high quality video capture but like the BT8x8 card it isn't new, plus the driver does not work at all with linux without re-compiling the kernel x.x (and even then it is not guranteed to work).

I was wondering if anyone knows of any other cards at least as good as the G400TV which I could use under linux?

Thanks,

SP

The best ones I have come across are the Hauppauge cards. I have also got the Winfast TV 2000 XP to work under linux.

The best video capture chip is Philips SAA7133 or better. I have a Lifeview Flyvideo 3000FM and it uses SAA7133. It works well. All video capture cards have the same requirements. When you deinterlace, the processor that is require should be a gigahertz or faster.

A COMPRO VideoMate TV Gold seems to be great from the reviews. Linux has this card listed in the CARDLIST. By now it should be in the UK. Unfortunately, you have to patch the kernel to 2.6.13 to make it work or wait until a stable verison of 2.6.13 comes out.

Thanks for the info I'll be sure to look into those cards

SP

The philips chip looks intresting, but the big problem is finding something which uses it and is current. I tried looking for some of the cards above, but many either seem to be no better than the old bt8x8 cards, have lots of problems or aren't even sold any more. That seemed to be a regularly occuring problem while I was searching for a capture card for linux -- finding a capture card which could still be bought(!) and which works ok.

For example, the recommended cards for use with programs such as the mjpegtools (just as an example) - the pinnacle dc10, dc10+, dc30 and Iomega buz are all dead cards which are no longer sold at all; the zoran chipset which my G400TV uses dosen't seem to be being used on very many cards. I could only find 1 mention of a dc10 even on ebay, and turned up 0 results for the dc30. Many of the other names of other capture cards such as happauge, wintv, etc. - the model numbers listed as working under linux simply showed up at most shops that the card was no longer being made or sold.

Linux media labs had an intresting zoran-based card, but at approx. $400 plus another $85 (P&P as I'm in the UK) it seemed to be overpriced.

There are lots of USB based video capture devices now too, but I'd be concerned about the quality due to the slow nature of USB.

Prehaps I should get my old Amiga's Vidi Amiga 12 to work under linux

SP

The Philips SAA7133 to SAA7135 is a lot better than BT878 or cx88 chips. The disadvantage of the SAA713x chips is a sound card is needed to record the audio if you want to capture from S-Video. I use Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 and the audio has very high quality. ALSA is working on the Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 LT. Do not be picky on the video capture card that is current because it will not be and probably will not work. The code for saa713x chips does not change a lot. Digital camcorders with firewire (IEEE-1394) pass-thru will give the highest quality. Getting DV utilities to work with the camcorder may be pain in the ass.

USB has the highest latency than any hotplug technology. Firewire (IEEE-1394) is better because it was design to work with multimedia devices that send large amounts of data.