I just scored a Hauppauge video capture card and am not sure ultimately if it working. I tried doing a capture using vlc and I just get a grainy picture. I honestly don't know much about these devices. Well I do use one external device with windoze but would like to try and watch tv on Ubuntu. I don't know what to get as it is a bit conpfusing. I am in Australia and I noticed that some of the apps mentioned ntsc and we have pal here so are there any aussies that can give me the heads up on this subject?

I think Ubuntu has tvtime, which I've never used but looks pretty good. you can set pal mode in the setup. there's also Kwintv, or if you're feeling really ambitious, mythtv to give you tivo capabilities.

Ah sounds good. Will download later today. I think we might be getting tivo in the future. There have been advertisements on free to air tv lately but it will be probably next year. Thanks

In recent experiments (with a hauppauge nova-t usb) I found kdetv, xawtv,
zapping (under SuSE 10.2, with 10.3's kernel 2.6.22) and the like a bit
picky about the devices they accept, but had good results with kaffeine.

So if you happen to run kde, try this. Just delete / rename
~./kde/share/apps/kaffeine, start kaffeine and see if it offers you any-
thing related to your card - this should work automatically.

HTH

For analog tv, tvtime works well for me, it has an easy to use on-screen configuration (right click to pop it up). It's supposed to support digital but I couldn't get it to work. For digital, I use mplayer.

I doubt any of the apps available have any problem with ntsc/pal, you just configure it to use the appropriate format.

Thanks will spend some time on this hopefully tonight. I have been spending too much time on the computers so need to get out do things!

Will these programs also capture/record tv shows. I am talking about tv from my aireal outside....not internet tv.

There are a number of programs to record tv, I use mencoder (part of mplayer). Not sure if tvtime can record, I'm not familiar with the others mentioned.

Note, though, if you're talking about analog tv, you will probably want to either encode to mpeg4/xvid/whatever on the fly (cpu heavy!) or save the raw data and encode later, which requires a LOT of diskspace (raw tv data is something like 1GB per *minute*).

+1

mythtv (or, the hauppauge card through mythtv) encodes it on the fly down to about 2GB per hour, which of course is much preferable. I have the pvr-150, and with the encoders on the card, the cpu barely takes a hit.

Ah, nice. I have no hardware encoder...

This is odd I searched for Mythtv in the add/remove thingo and it only shows Mythbuntu. It talks about Mythtv but it is not there.

I have been using an external Leadtek/Winfast product with my windoze machine to capture analogue tv for a few months now so I am aware how large or small the files sizes can be when you capture. Unfortunately with that external usb device it is realllllllyyyy small and the picture is crap so I am hoping to see something impressive from the internal one I have now in the Linux box. To be able to record from either analogue tv or vcr is a dream as I haven't had to pay for all this stuff. I found both the external device and this internal card. So ultimately I don't even know this thing is working but i can only give it a go.

do you have the universe and multiverse repositories enabled? I don't use ubuntu so I can't test it, but this guide looks pretty helpful:

http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php

Hi sorry I have mythTV now installed.
I am looking at that page that you sent and I am looking at the section that tests the card but that page is talking about another country and I am not sure how to change the area scan. It says something about Winter Hill and I don't know if that is a city, town, state or what? Would you be able to see that page and give me some insite?
..............................
Oh I did try to run mythtv yesterday instially but there was a lot I didn't understand. I copied some of the things that it said to me that I didn't understand:
You must run mythtv-setup as a user in the 'mythtv' group in order to complete mythtv configuration. Note that this program requires an X display, so you must either login to an X session as a user in the 'mythtv' group, or otherwise arrange for that user to have access to your X display.

You must complete all four steps presented in the program.

Once you have done this, you may start the backend by executing the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start

..............................................

The generated password for this machine is 'F3DqQElW'. If you are adding this machine to an existing mythtv-network, you will want to update this password to the one in use by the network after completing installation.

This can be done by: 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure mythtv-common'.

In case you forget this password, it is also stored in '/etc/mythtv/mysql.txt'.

MythTV-Database reconfigure required

The mythtv-database package was upgraded or installed, but was unable to contact a MySQL server.
If you were in the process of dist-upgrading, this is normal as mysql-server is stopped for a portion of the upgrade.
If this is a fresh package installation, verify that mysql-server is installed and running. Once you have verified the server is running, you can reconfigure the package by running 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure mythtv-database'.
If your root password or location of the MySQL server are non standard, you can also update them via 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure mythtv-database'.