Hello all,

What is the best TV Tuner card for Linux?

The options I would like are:

1. Pause live TV
2. Record TV reliably with very good DVD quality
3. Be able to send the recorded show to a regular TV that has S-video and coax input.
4. Record very lengthy shows (ballgames)
5. Record multiple shows at once.
6. Be somewhat straight forward to use and setup
7. Good user interface to set up the recordings.
8. Allow the box to be used without a monitor (TV will be computer monitor)

THANKS!

I think I should also list some things that do not matter:

Whether PCI or AGP.
Brand doesnt matter.



Also:

I am using RedHat 8 with the latest kernel.

......it's not going to happen.....

Think about how long it takes just to rip a DVD at good quality, you can't match a TV.....not with the current hardware last I looked into it but you can get pretty good quality, but never DVD. Also, there are only a handful out there so you may as well research yourself.

Very few programs will do that.

Unless you buy a line doubler or quadrupler, you are out of luck. Also you need tons of storage and atleast hardware RAID 0. 3ware comes to mind for hardware RAID.

To get near good quality for
PAL
352 X 576

NTSC
352 X 480

The above will capture all the lines. Then you need to put through a good deinterlacer and resize the height to half the size. The type codec also affects the quality. Use either Huffyuv (yep there is source code) or MJPEG. Raw RGB codecs takes too much processing power and storage. Huffyuv is preferred because it takes the frame in yuv colorspace format and does like a pkzip compress.

Buy the best VGA to TV converter from Focus Enhancments.

More than a few programs will do that.

Takes to much processing power and the PCI bus will be overloaded to do just one. You are in dream land if you think you can.

Only one that is straight forward. Basically if your video capture card does not support Video 4 Linux, it will not be easy to setup.

Only few programs.

Theres one problem, there are two different technologies between the two. The computer monitor is easier to see text because of non-interlace. TVs have a hard time displaying text because they use interlacing. HDTVs are little better but still bad when viewing text. Make sure the text is display in the proper block format.


IMO, tvtime has the best output but it doesn't have a recording feature. I think having video capture on the AGP video card is better because the video transmission doesn't have to fight with the IDE controller and other PCI cards.

You may want to apply the low latency patch to the kernel for better video capture.

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvp...datasheet.html

The Hauppauge PVR-350 and 250 are the two best cards for the cash imho.

1. MythTV
2. MythTV with Satellite connection. (you can only record as good as your source is)
3. MythTV (with TV Out on your video card)
4. MythTV (with large HD I'd suggest at the least an 80Gig for the recordings)
5. MythTV (no problem with multiple TV Cards.)
6. MythTV (slight learning curve to get setup, but every day use is ulta simple)
7. MythTV (been using it for about 6 months and loving it)
8. MythTV (with TV Out on your video card)

So you see MythTV rocks your socks, check it out.
www.mythtv.org

There is a large support group and mailing list so if you get stuck you can get the answer in a reasonable time.