TV Chip - Record to Hard drive
 

Hi, I just installed a new Hauppage WinTV Chip into my computer (btw thx to all the ppl who helped me in the hardware forum, I probably would have gone ATI without your help). SuSE recognizes the chip in Yast and so does KRadio and KDETV. But, XawTV confuses the hell out of me. Can someone please explain how to record live tv to a video on the hard drive with this program or a better program? Anyways, tty all l.

Xawtv and kdetv are not supposed to record, just playback. To record you have to set mythtv or freevo.
By the way: try tvtime for playing back. The best there is.

I'd never tried it, but TVTime is a good program, thx for the recommendation. As for MythTV, I'm just on my way to work but I'll try it later today and see how it works. Any tips on where I can get SUSE RPMs for it? Or do I have to compile it? Anyways, ttyal.

Avifile has a tool called "avicap" that will record TV.
I don't know if I have permission issues or what, but
if I want to preview while recording I have to run "v4l-conf"
from an su'ed terminal before running the thing.
(v4l-conf comes with xawtv)
It's "QT" so you'll need that stuff.
If you have a cheap card it's best to record at low res,
(320x240 for ntsc) and maybe run a cpu monitor to see
which codec is easiest on your machine.

FFTV is really nice but I can't get smooth video out of it.

Gv4l is a frontend for transcode for recording from a v4l device.
It's good looking and easy to use but unless you can figure out how to
record your audio uncompressed, you may have a/v sync problems.
Transcode requires "libdv" in order to preview while recording.

Packages for suse can be found via http at rpm.pbone.net. If you have apt4rpm, or apt4suse, you can apt-get those packages.
I guess someone built a bootable distro, to run mythtv. Its easier than setting it.
This is a nice resource for searching:
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

I don't want MythTV using MySQL over a server or anything. Is there anyway to just use it as a normal program. I have another post started about the problems I am having getting MySQL to work.