[CLUE-Tech] tv cards

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 20:42, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> The fully supported (I think):
> http://www.hauppage.com/pages/products/data_go.html
> http://www.hauppage.com/pages/products/data_gofm.html
> 
> The "FM" model is listed by SuSE as WinTV-PCI-FM, listed on Hauppage's
> site as WinTV-Go-FM. SuSE lists the chipsets, not Hauppage's model
> numbers, so it's hard to tell for sure here.

There are are only a few basic chipsets used for TV cards and most are
supported to one extent or another.  See the bttv web site
(http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/drivers.html).  You need too look for
chipset support as opposed to a list of cards because the models of
cards change all the time even though their base chipsets stay pretty
common.

I use a WinTV card from a few years back - worked out of the box and is
well supported in current kernels/distributions by both v4l (abstracted
video layer in the kernel) and the bttv driver (kernel driver for
bt848/878 chips).  The quality of the image varies with the TV card and
your video card.  Not to mention how you get the video input into the TV
card (coax or S-Video or composite hookup).

I'm also playing quite heavily with MythTV and MiniMyth (PXE boot client
that runs on EPIA-M systems).  My MythTV server (aka backend) uses a
WinTV PVR-250 with the ivtv (http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/) driver that I
compiled into a new kernel.  I had to manually patch the 2.4.x kernel as
well - a process that is simple once you know how but hard to figure out
if you don't know what to patch.  The ivtv driver is not included in
current kernels to my knowledge.  

My client box is an EPIA-M miniITX motherboard in a custom wooden case
(see mini-itx.com for some fun examples).  I'm building a custom PXE
boot based distribution based on the 2.4.6 kernel patched with publicly
released patches for this hardware as well as XFree86 patched for the TV
out and hw MPEG decoding.  Its a fun project, as soon as I can figure
out why the 2.6.6 kernel doesn't like booting a cramfs filesystem.  Once
its done, I'll have distributed clients throughout the house.  Then I'll
have to pump up the disk space to about a terabyte on RAID to rip all my
DVDs.

Or I could just buy a Tivo.  :-)
-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |    We need somebody who can work 
The Graphics Muse           |    independently and innovatively in the
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |    face of unreasonable demands."
http://www.graphics-muse.com        Job posting at Stanford CS Department