Hi all.

I would like to buy a TV Tuner Card so I can watch and record live TV on my pc. First, my PC specs are down below and I will be doing this in SuSE 9.1.

I have looked in a couple of stores and all I have found is an external thing that hooks into my monitor and bypasses the harddrive, therefore I can't record, and an ATI card which can do what I want. However, as it is an ATI Card, I don't know how well it would work. Does anyone know of any generic cards I can find, and also if anyone has a TV Card, could you please tell me your distro, the name of the card, cost of the card and the ease of installation of the drivers.

Also, is the TV Tuner Card also a video card??? I don't think it is, but there was one which was both, and if I have to replace my NVidia card then I am not going to bother. Anyways, that is all I need to know. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Talk to you all later

All card based on the connexant chip BT848, BT878, BT878A... will be OK. The driver is called bttv ("http://www.metzlerbros.org/bttv.html" and "http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/bttv.html" but the driver is present in the official kernel sources) and the only hard point of the installation is to manually recognize the tuner if it is not properly detected by the driver... A TV Tuner card is only an acquisition card with a tuner, generally you only can grab video from any composite or S-video source, and plug an aerial for watching TV. I don't know any video card wich made TV tuner in the same time, and if there is one, look for the driver before buy.

The guy at the store is probably dumb, thats whut he told me it was, a video card with a tv tuner. It was ATI, and if the guy is right then I wouldn't want it because I am not giving up my Nvidia card. But ya, I'll print this forum (minus the guy being an idiot part) and show him and he should be able to help me out. Do you happen to know any of the retail names for this chipsets????

I use a Hauppage wintvgo, which is a cheap pci tvcard using the bt878 chipset.
It was $50 us and is pretty much the low end of the spectrum. Recording with it
is best done at low res. (320x240)
They make better cards though, It depends what you want to spend.
If you go with a cheapo be careful of the chipset! Make sure you get the bt848
or 878. Some of these cards come with a different chip that won't work on linux.

http://www.hauppauge.com/index.htm

The guy at the store is probably right. ATI make such a thing. But the comments on the LQ-HCL are not very encouraging:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...hp?product=558

Otherwise the above suggestions sound like good advice. You can always check Google once you have a specific item in mind. Avoid anything that does not have generally positive reports.

If the ATI is an All-in-Wonder card, the TV-in does not yet work under Linux (drivers do not support it). If it's a TV Wonder card it might work... I think I heard that it's based on a BT878 chip, but I'm not sure.

Not worth it though-- you can get a WinTVGO and cards of that stripe for Euro25 here in Holland, and I'm sure they're equally cheap in Canada. And they're known to work.

Alright, but the only thing I saw with WinTVGo on the box was something that bypassed the harddrive and hooked directly into the monitor somehow. Therefore I couldn't record. I guess I'll hve to check around somemmore.

The driver code in the linux kernel (bttv-cards.c) has a big list of supported hardware. Motub is right - the ATI TV-Wonder is there. Other big names in the list are Hauppage, Winfast, Pinnacle, Magic, Avermedia, Flyvideo, Terra.

There also seem to be quite a few cards using the Philips saa7134 supp.orted (saa7134-cards.c). Also the Conexant 2388x (cx88-cards.c).