I need a suggestion of a good, video capture card or device to transfer home movies to my computer, as well as record tv programs on my computer. Any suggestions would be appreciated

Thanks again

Any card based on the bt878 or saa7134 chips will work fine. Some of them can be quite good. Here in brazil the pixelviews are popular. So are the pinnacle's, but a bit more expensive.

There can be other well supported chips. These are the ones I know.

To record you can use streamer, mencoder (part of the mplayer suite) or ffmpeg. Also xawtv seems to be able to record.

1 members found this post helpful.

Well, any bt878-based cards EXCEPT ATI's cards.

Thanks, that was very helpful.

The best quality is video capture cards based on Philips saa7130 to saa7135. The Conexant chips (BT878, and cx88) are grainy. The Philips chips gives almost the same quality as ATI Rage Theater.

I can easily get 64 kilobytes per second during playback after recording with very little block or not even noticable blocks when using the Philips 7133 based video capture card. I can not do the same with my bt878 video capture card.

The Compro VideoMate TV Gold looks like a good card if you care about remote control.

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I'm a little confused. I am looking to buy a new video capture card for use under Linux with MythTV, and put the video into as close to lossless as I can get, meaning something like raw AVI or Huffy.

I do not understand much about chip archecture or how to know if a certain model of a card uses that. I would really appreciate knowing some card model names and numbers so I could look them up. Thanks.

I use ATI TV Wonder VE cards for 4 years whith Fedora3, Mandriva 2005, ALT Linux, ASP Linux. This is the more quality card, more than PixelView or KWorld. I setup params manualy, becouse hardware autodetect ALWAYS set wrong params to this card (I mean tuner type). On kernel-2.6... i patch driver by hands, becose of wrong sound frequency for my region when setup secam standart (Ukraine, Russia). On kernel's 2.4 - no problems.

I capture video 768x576 whith deinterlace filter on the fly and compression in MPEG-4 (lavc), sound in MPEG2 (lavc). This all on Athlon 950 ! ASP Linux 9.2 + mencoder. Windows user's can't do the same ! If i use mjpeg CPU usage is about 45 % !

Any video capture card that is based on Philips SAA71xx chip provides very clear pictures. The video cards based on Fusion/Conexant BT878 and Conexant chips capture grainy videos.

The only way to tell what video capture contains a certain chip is to look at the pictures. Unfortunately, companies are using Conexant chips.

Hi,

What was used to record the home movies? If they were recorded on a video recorder with an S-video output, I'd suggest using one of Canopus analog to digital converters. A firewire device. Canopus makes several models depending on how much you are willing to spend. I have an ADVC-110 that is used to capture VHS tapes as well as programs from a satellite receiver. I've been very pleased with the ADVC-110. No audio/video sync problems whatsoever. It cost around $215 or so US. Much more expensive in other parts of the world. Or so I've heard.

Just my 2 cents. FWIW.


Stan

Not really. I just grab TV from my cable.

I have a ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon and its not supported under MythTV, so I need to grab a new one.

hi there,
got almost same card- works great with saa7134 but cant figure is there any way to map buttons on my remote control. once it works one way once the other. really, have no idea what it depends on..
im on ubuntu

Hi

We had one camera server in the company i work for. I say we HAD cause it's just crashed... hehe

Of course my first thought was set a linux server instead, but i have never heard about linux cam server. Is there any server?

The prior server stayed in the IT room and the captured images could be seen in the guard cabin.

Can it be done in linux?

That's the hardware that the server is suposed to have:

00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
00:09.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
00:0a.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)


Regards,
Tilinho

Yes, it's many cam servers on Linux. For yours hardware I recommend to use motion http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome
I use it for about 2 years in my home guard system.

But for your purpose may be better to use some cheap DVR. Like CPD-505, CPD-507 ...

Good Luck

darion

Thanks dude, im gonna take a look at it.

Regards

I got a CentOS 4.5 box (Trixbox) and I want to be able to use it as a Zone Minder DVR as well as an Asterisk PBX. The problem is, it looks like the Bt878 Video Capture drivers are turned off by default in the kernel. I am not sure how to turn them back on, I downloaded the kernel source rpm using yum, then did a make mrproper make menuconfig, went to Device Drivers --->
Multimedia devices ---> Video For Linux ---> and clicked on <M> BT848 Video For Linux <M> Conexant 2388x (bt878 successor) support (I assume the <M> means module. The I did a make and got this error.

[root@asterisk1 linux]# make rpm
make clean
CLEAN .tmp_versions
set -e; cd ..; ln -sf /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-34.0.2.EL-smp-i686 kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default
set -e; cd ..; tar -cz -f kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default.tar.gz kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default/.
set -e; cd ..; rm kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default
set -e; \
/bin/sh /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-34.0.2.EL-smp-i686/scripts/mkversion > /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-34.0.2.EL-smp-i686/.tmp_version
set -e; \
mv -f /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-34.0.2.EL-smp-i686/.tmp_version /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-34.0.2.EL-smp-i686/.version
rpmbuild --target i386 -ta ../kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default.tar.gz
Building target platforms: i386
Building for target i386
error: File ../kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default.tar.gz: No such file or directory
sh: ../kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default.tar.gz: No such file or directory
sh: ../kernel-2.6.934.0.2.ELsmp.default.tar.gz: No such file or directory
error: Name field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Version field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Release field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Summary field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Group field must be present in package: (main package)
error: License field must be present in package: (main package)
make[1]: *** [rpm] Error 1
make: *** [rpm] Error 2

Any Ideaa?

Also I want to retain asterisk and it's modules in my kernel.