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fbi (part of fbida)

http://linux.bytesex.org/fbida/

I tend to prefer the Hauppauge PVR 150/250/350 or 500 cards. They're easily available and have good quality. They all do MPEG encoding on-board.

You can find a databases and software at:
www.mythtv.org
www.freevo.org
http://linux.bytesex.org/v4l2/bttv.html
http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page

That's definitely not true. I'm currently using an ATI TV Wonder Pro in my MythTV box (Gentoo-based) and it works fine.

A lot of cards, including the ATI TV Wonder Pro, work via V4L and the bttv driver. Check it out. I've found that the card works far better in Linux than it did in Windows!

What you're describing may just be a problem with the Bt8x8 driver. I have a Bt8x8 card, and getting it to work well was a complete nightmare. I had to set gbuffers to 32 (i.e. allocate space for 32 frames in the kernel) to keep streamer from dropping frames constantly. And there was this weird artifact where a frame from about a second ago would suddenly get replayed. I never fixed that one. And video4linux will lock up the entire machine on some relatively common situations.

I finally gave up and bought a Canopus ADVC-300, which connects via FireWire, and doesn't rely on video4linux at all.

I was pretty disappointed with the experience. Still, in general, Microsoft is a lot crappier.

Buy a little TV capture card from Hauppage with FM capability like this one. Plug it into your linux box and use xawtv's streamer application to record Loveline every night (or whatever your favorite radio show is). Then use lame to convert that to MP3.

Then, listen at work. I've been doing this for years. Its not great for productivity, but it keeps you from getting bored and getting even more off task.

Yet another place where linux rules for simplicity and functionality! The box doing this is a PII/333MHz, which also records video (a la Tivo).

Also, you can tune into Shoutcast's various comedy channels.

I think this is a more interesting question. I startx mostly for watching TV (fbtv and vcr don't do it for me), but there are a few other apps that keep me there: spreadsheet software and personal finance software being the top two. What else do you miss if you're on the console?

My SAA-based card from Medion works a treat. grab the drivers from bytesex and take your pick from the viewers. Recommended, tvtime.

• 
  bttv/v4l patch
  
  bluez kernel patch (bluetooth)
  
  matrox frame buffer patch
  
  alsa 1.0.1 kernel patch
  
  hostap (accesspoint sw for prism hardware)
  
  qc-usb (quickcam express driver)

The newer replacement for the old Brooktree chips is the Conexant CX2388x series, used in cards like some of the Hauppage cards, the Asus TV Tuner and MSI TV@nywhere. These chips have a number of improvements - for example, better support for high-res capture (up to 754x480), and it also has a real comb filter in it (BT8x8 has just a crappy notch filter like a 15-year-old TV, apparently) which makes a difference in image quality from RF or composite sources. DScaler includes support for these chips now, and there is a Linux driver available, though it seems to be a very early version.

The newer replacement for the old Brooktree chips is the Conexant CX2388x series, used in cards like some of the Hauppage cards, the Asus TV Tuner and MSI TV@nywhere. These chips have a number of improvements - for example, better support for high-res capture (up to 754x480), and it also has a real comb filter in it (BT8x8 has just a crappy notch filter like a 15-year-old TV, apparently) which makes a difference in image quality from RF or composite sources. DScaler includes support for these chips now, and there is a Linux driver available, though it seems to be a very early version.

or for most other cards (bt878 or bt848) BTTV (included in the linux kernel)

I got my TV card working in 2.6 (test3) after applying the patches here: http://bytesex.org/patches/

Most of the suggestions here require ~$500 DVD burners, expensive capture hardware or locating ancient uber-vhs decks which probably aren't that easy to find service for.

I suggest an mid range used PC ~500mhz, coupled with a cd-burner and a $90 CDN TV Tuner card. I use the ATI TV Wonder PCI, which can be found for much less on Ebay... either way nearly every Tuner card i've come across is supported by BTTV, although I've had small luck with Gatos which is designed for ATI All-In-Wonder cards.

So for software, we're looking at:
Linux (i use Debian with 2.4.18)
Compile BTTV and TV Tuner support in your kernel or modules if needed
Nuppelvideo - great *ZERO* frame dropping capture software which will result in huge, quality, 640x480, raw, stereo clips.
Transcode which will convert your Nuppelvideo files into any format you choose, I prefer DivX 5, which squashes your clips down to size suitable for 700mb discs. No DVD needed.

If you're still wondering why we're using a TV tuner card, it's that fact that almost all of them have S-Video/Composite/Stero inputs, so you can capture from most sources... incl. VHS, Beta, whatever.

The quality is great IMHO, for the small amount of $$ and the ease of transfer once you have a handle on the software. There are load of resources out there, much of the DVD ripping FAQs mirror all the audio/video sync/editing info you'll need to master this process.

To top it all off, if you use an avi file format, like DivX uses, you can use VirtualDub, free software that allows you to chop up clips, join them and fix repair/mix audio features on your clips. Just make sure you choose Direct Stream Copy so the clips are "spliced" (very quick) and not processed (hours zzzzzzzz).

All of this with free software, a few bucks, your old computer... does it get any better?

• scsicontrol: scu, sg-utils
  
• scsiha: scsiadd or rescan-scsi-bus.sh
  
• stacker: mtx or scsi-changer

SCSI HOW-TO: 9.3 Tape driver (st)

I've gotten linux working with amanda and a scsi tape changer just fine. The tape changer stuff is here: http://bytesex.org/changer.html

Works like a charm on like 5 tape changers that I admin.

I thought the intent of his question was pretty obvious. He's noticed that readily-available media offerings aren't generally high-quality, but that there is a fair amount of good stuff floating around that's relatively freely available, and though he isn't sure what's involved yet, he'd like to put his metaphorical money where his proverbial mouth is and try to contribute to this pool of good watchable material.

In other words, "While there seem to be fewer and fewer worthwhile shows in the mainstream media (such as the unnamed show that has been canceled, and I think most slashdotters can guess what the likely quality of its replacement show will be) there seems to be a growing pool of good free material online, and I'd like to contribute. Has anyone here been involved in this? What do I need to know to participate?"

Yes, it IS a very general question, which contains a lot of smaller questions within it, but this is Slashdot, not rec.arts.video.online.bandwidth-questions or some similarly specific tech support forum. I think what the poster was hoping for is some discussion of all of the aspects so that he'll be able to formulate more specific questions and take them to more focussed forums. Besides - general or not, someone interested in improving the quality of available entertainment ought to be encouraged regardless of how much they already know about the subject, not told to go away until they already know most of what they need to do...

(I didn't at all get any sense that he wanted to continue the cancelled show, just that the cancelling of what he considered to be a good show was an indicator of the decline of "mainstream media" quality, which I think most of us can sympathise with.)

So, yes, all of the above, and more. Seems a perfectly valid and potentially informative topic for discussion here. A few of us occasionally read the more general "ask slashdot" discussions for general education ourselves...

So...to contribute what little I can:

Firstly, decent writing and acting (even for animation - hey, somebody has to do the voices) is the key to watchable material. This is probably already obvious to the person asking the question (as well as everyone else here) but it should be said.

As to the "internet distribution" portion of the question, one might contact the The Internet Archive and the folks at Creative Commons about hosting and licensing, if one's willing to release the material freely.

At this point I'll also throw in a nod to one of my "pet causes" - Ogg Theora which, if they get a bit more visible on the development of it (likely to happen in March, when the format freeze is supposedly scheduled, though the second Alpha release is due Real Soon Now. At the moment, though, development appears to be a "Monty Only" project that shows up as infrequent "chunks" of updates in CVS when official releases come out. At least news is starting to show up on the mailing list...) will supply a very nice no-license-hassle format for distribution.

Transforming the recordings to a wide variety of internet-ready formats can be done with MPlayer/MEncoder in combination with a few other tools (ffmpeg, mjpegtools, the aforementioned Ogg Theora), not to mention using mjpegtools' encoders to convert video dumped from MPlayer to VCD or SVCD format for viewing on standalone players.

Someone else will have to comment on technical issues of camera and recording media types most suitable for generating internet-ready material. In MY opinion, if one handles the rest of the matter well, it's probably possible to produce perfectly adequate "good amateur quality" internet videos with ordinary off-the-shelf video cameras and a halfway-decent digitizing card. Last time I attempted video capture it was from a VHS tape, with a BT878-based card and "streamer" from Xawtv to store as a relatively high quality mjpeg/pcm quicktime file [to allow > 2GB files] then dumped to mjpegtools to generate SVCDs.

Any other topics in this broad discussion I've missed?...

I have your card, the ATI TV Wonder. It captures crisp, stereo clips at 640x480 at a full 30fps, no frame drops.

Have a look into BTTV (a driver) XawTV (a player) and a variety of recording software, I prefer Nuppelvideo which can be converted to virtually any format (including DivX 5) using transcode.

The bttv stuff is included in the kernel source all the rest is only a brief compile or an apt-get xxxxx.
It takes a little while to get everything running, but once you do, it runs completely stable and uses very little resources. Say goodbye to that awful ATI capture software.
The finale being that all these clips can be edited using Cinelerra 1.0.

Time to start archiving Trek, SNL and The Osbournes?

I ditched my vcr months ago. Just get a tv capture card with the bttv848 chip for video in [I recommend the winTV-FM, as it also has a stereo decoder and sound capture dsp on the card, leaving your existing sound card free, about $50 street]

Then, all you need is a good audio sync maintaining capture program like NewVideoRecorder and a good MP4 codec, and you're set! Oh, you probably need a least an athlon 1800 or equivilant, to do realtime 640x480 encoding capture with good deinterlacing. Much weaker systems can easily handle 320x240, which isn't much worse than vhs. Add in a few 80gig drives, a fast CDR, and you've got entertainment bliss.
Did I mention that the hauppage card comes with a remote, and it too is supported. So, sit back on the couch, with the computer hooked up to both record and play to your big screen tv, easily controlled by a remote.

It's being done right now, today, on peoples linux boxes. I've been doing it for over 4 months!

The only bad thing is that, currently, I still find the best application for editing commercials out of shows I want to archive, to be virtualdub [a win32 app]. It runs under wine, sure, but it still kind of hurts to have to do it. At least it's GPLd, though.

v4l2

This would allow the latest bttv driver to be packaged with the kernel once more...

After the preemptive patch, that's the first patch I run on a plain vanilla kernel.

Let's see, I've got my video capture card working on v4l, I've got video capture to mjpeg (good balance of 'quality of original encoding' and 'file size taken up by original encoding') working through xawtv's(no, not a troll, that really is xawtv's URL) 'Streamer' utility, I've got framerate and format conversions of other file types working through mplayer's Mencoder, and I've got The MJPEG tools for generation of VCD and SVCD video from the original sources (the yuvdenoise filter is handy when transferring old VHS's to VCD), and when I want to get more complex with my conversions, I've got transcode (the '.ppml' format for subtitle rendering seems to support quite a lot of effects...) and now I've got Cinelerra (which I can never seem to spell properly the first time) for messing with the video itself, once I figure out how to use the program (which now runs on my Slackware box after seeing a previous poster's tip about finding the libgcc* libraries and such in OpenOffice - Thanks!).

Now if only I could get xawtv to recognize that I have libquicktime.so on my machine so that I could save my video to .mov's (so that I can get more than 2GB at a time) I'd be set...

Well, that and support for .ogg [XVid/VP3]/Vorbis video file encoding (MPlayer already supports playback at least, or so I'm told, and it sounds like support for this in ffmpeg may be coming Real Soon Now from what I've seen on the mailing list...)

So, there's quite a lot of work that seems to be going on with Linux multimedia (not even counting proprietary packages and audio-only tools) if you look long enough...

Getting the BT878 work: lspci and look if it is really a 878 activate i2c an bttv sound in the kernel. These are spread config options. modules are:
tuner 8196 1 (autoclean)
tvaudio 9856 0 (autoclean)
msp3400 14160 1 (autoclean)
bttv 60608 1 (autoclean)
i2c-algo-bit 7148 1 (autoclean) [bttv]
i2c-core 12992 0 (autoclean) [tuner tvaudio msp3400 bttv i2c-al go-bit]
videodev 4672 4 (autoclean) [bttv]
use xawtv at xawtv for testing

I've got one of the Hauppauge WinTV cards and use xawtv for watching TV. It's even got image capture and video record functions, but I find that the video capture is a little lacking. Though, maybe I just don't have the right libraries or settings.

I must say that I was quite impressed with xawtv, too. With the kernel driver installed and all, it was pretty simple to get it working with the xvideo extension.

This would be a bit pricey for personal use (the jukebox is about $8K), but it's worked out extremely well for high-volume ripping and encoding.