I'm getting cable again soon, and I'm looking for a good cheap NTSC TV tuner for my comp. Something similar to the WinTV-GO, but with stereo. I'm looking in about the $30-$50 price range. I'd also like it to have an RF remote that'll work fine with KDE.

I'm not sure how I plan on having my setup for the DVR style setup I want, I'd like to use MythTV but I'm not sure how good that'll run on my desktop since it's designed as a full-screen thing. If MythTV won't work, I'd like to find something that's similar, but built for a desktop PC instead of a fullscreen enviroment.
And just to throw out some of my plans for it, I'd like to be able to remotely activate a video stream so that I can watch TV from school, with a 350k max upload, what's the best way to stream video up. I've looked at VideoLAN, which I might use if I can get SDL worked out. And what codec would be best for about 320x240 300k streaming?

I do not suggest a video capture card with remote because some of the models are not compatible with Linux and they do not not have a lot of buttons. You can get Lifeview FlyVideo 3000. It has everything you want but the remote looks lame. Newegg sales it for $55. The capture chip on that card will give you the best quality, so the encoder can give you the best compression ratio to send over 350K (I hope its kilobytes not kilobits) internet connection. For your upload bandwidth I suggest something around 150K to 250K for your maximum video transfer to be safe, but video would be blocky even at 320 X 240 capture. For the remote, I suggest Streamzap.

The bad news about using the Lifeview FlyVideo 3000 is the capture chip which will work in Linux, but you have to download software from Video4Linux sites. Slackware 10 does not come with it. I do not know about the tuner but it should work.

You do not need SDL to get VLC (Video Lan Client) to work. You just need the development packages for X11 installed. I think its on disc 1. Find it and use installpkg. Yes V4L can be used, but you need to setup a web server like Apache. Make sure you compile VLC with V4L (Video 4 Linux) feature. Also you will have to adjust VLC settings, so it can transfer around 150K to 250K over a network.

KDE is just a desktop manager. If the card works, any program that access V4L will give you a picture what the capture card is receiving.

For just watching tv, I suggest tvtime. It has the best quality that I have seen for both commerical programs in Windows and free programs in Linux. MPlayer will do the same too but not at the same quality as tvtime.

Thanks a lot for the info!

All I really want is a cheap remote, I won't be more than 10 ft from my computer and I just want something for volume and channel changing.

The problem that my DSL provider only gives me 368-ish kilobits per second upload, though I have a maximum of 6MBitPS download, the highest I've reached being about 400Kbyte p/s.

The main problem I have with SDL is that with the package that comes with the distro (or the 1.2.7 from the online package manager), compiling any SDL app acts like it's not there (configure works fine though), and it won't compile from source either.

The ATI Wonder VE Remote works very well for me. It's cheap and the remote works fine after a "modprobe ati_remote". For the price, you can't go wrong. I use it the same way you would as well - 10 feet away from my 19" monitor. As for the video streaming stuff, that would be interesting to try - i.e. i haven't done this nor can i comment on it.

**Edit - oh ya, as for the module....

modprobe bttv tuner=2

That gets me crystal clear video for NTSC with TvTime.

I think I just might go after that ATI... even though it is around $80.

TVTime does look good, but yet I'd also like a program that has a TV guide viewer and scheduler for recording built into the same app. Do you guys think that using Myth as a desktop tuner app would be bad?

I have SDL working on my Slackware 10 system though I sometimes use it. You will have to install the sdl develop tgz file from one of the disc.

360 kilobits per sec (45 KB/s) is not enough to transfer full motion video, but it is enough to stream audio files. I have an upload bandwidth of 512 kilobits per sec (64 KB/s). I do not do what you want to do because I'm sharing the connection with other people. I can get by using 32 kbit MP3 mono audio and using xvid to compress a 160 X 120 video, but it will be blocky and sometimes lag a lot.

No. I would just compile it and run it on a virtual terminal. Then you can switch back and forth from desktop to MythTV terminal. I have not done that yet. I use MPlayer's mencoder to capture videos through Hauppauge WinTV GO. WinTV Go has a stereo, but its only through its stereo connector (headphone-like connector). I use a cable box or VCR to be the tuner because they have a better tuner than whats on the capture cards with TV tuners.