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Try a WinTV-HD or WinTV-D

On the other hand, Hauppauge has WinTV-PVR and a google showed several articles refering to those devices as PVRs. So the "jury is still out", but "I see the tide turning", [[insert more sayings here]]

Also, you are sorta right about not knowing that is available with DVRs, I have seen them used and played with a couple (including my father's house), but I do not yet own one. I will (most likely) purchase one over the next year. I am a little confused over your comment that "they sell themselves to a giant Asian firm" and that being better than the hated Hollywood, but the price factor of ReplayTV might push me to that system.

As far as Digital cable sucking, well you must not have any experience with the best feature, on-demand, because the channel quide will start (predictably) at "1" (which is On-Demand). However, I don't use the channel quide in "full format", somtimes I use it to see which "reqular" movies are starting or to check my "favorites", otherwise it's a bit of a pain flipping through over a hundred channels on screen of (maybe) 10 titles at a time. However, mostly I like the show title which shows up even when it's on commercial (a must have for channel surfing). From that I can check that channel's shows for the rest of the night (and find out the "info").

-Ted

The Myth TV mailing list suggests that the Hauppage PVR-250 is the best choice. Someone on the list said it can be found for $90 OEM.

record one show while watching another

According to the MythTV site, you'll need two TV tuner cards to do that.

You mean encoder like this one ($149, includes TV tuner)?

The Via C3 series is pretty anemic, especially in the FPU department. The Nehemiah series has a vastly improved FPU, but the current generation of Hush systems don't use them.

In any case, if MPEG2 is what you want, the Hauppage WinTV PVR-250 offers hardware MPEG2 compression. They just got basic support for it in MythTV in Linux, too. Linux support for the EPIA's onboard MPEG2 decoder is forthcoming as well (Alan Cox has one).

My only issue would be the AC97-based onboard sound. Hopefully VIA comes out with this board soon - it has the very high quality Envy24 24/96 sound chip on it. A lot of "semi-pro" recording cards like those from M-Audio use the Envy24 series. One good feature is lack of resampling on the SPDIF output.

Hmmm.. maybe using Hauppage's PVR card (which has hardware MPEG encoding/decoding) would be an option in this case. Linux drivers for this card are still in pre-alpha stage, with only a few available features implemented, though. So that would have to wait And I don't have money to buy this stuff anyways. A man can dream, though. :-)

Cheers!

Costyn.

Both MythTV and Freevo are really coming along nicely, the already challenge most commercial PVR system in the feature department. Both projects seem to be moving forward in a healthy speed, and projects of this type are bound to get a lot of support from geeks at home. So, the future looks bright for the OS PVR systems i reckon.

But personally Ill be waiting a little while longer before i make my own little PVR box, im waiting for the IvyTV project's drivers to mature some more. And then use a Hauppauge WinTV 350 as the base for my box, this will give me real time hardware mpeg-2 encoding/decoding. The IvyTV team are doing great, in record time they have a partly working driver and a plug in for mythtv. So i think its safe to say that within a years time well see a Video4Linux2 compliant driver with hardware encoding/decoding support from them.

So why do i want to encode to mpeg-2 anyways? I want to use mpeg-2 as the primary format on the box and divx as a "backup" format. Also with hardware mpeg-2 encoding, it should be possible for me to include a DVD burner and make it possible for me to record directly to a video dvd. Which would be really neat =)

the $199 WinTV-D card or the $299 WinTV-HD card which has a built-in Dolby Digital decoder? Both of these will let you not only view HDTV, but record it to disk as well.

the $199 WinTV-D card or the $299 WinTV-HD card which has a built-in Dolby Digital decoder? Both of these will let you not only view HDTV, but record it to disk as well.

Obviously this product isn't intending to supplant living room HDTV sets, but rather is a niche product for a niche purpose. Your contention that a 19" monitor is "too small" to show the differences between HDTV and NTSC seems flawed: You seem to presume that someone would put their 19" monitor in the middle of their living room and sit 12 feet away, rather than the more likely "guy sitting at his home office/computer desk watching HDTV". At close proximity there most certainly would be a difference between the two.

Of course I don't see why this product is getting attention, given that Hauppauge has had something similar for a while now.

BUT, the MUCH easier way is to use a device with a built in MPEG2 encoder chip. Plug in analog and it spits out an MPEG2 file. As mentioned previously, the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge. The Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 is another product with a hardware MPEG2 encoder.

But probably the easiest way to do this is to just go buy a Standalone DVD recorder.

-S

HD DVD is still in a blue-laser MPEG-2 vs. red-laser MPEG-4 fight, but digital VCRs already exist and do let you record high definition programming.

It's called D-VHS. D-Theater is a standard on top of that that adds tough encryption for distribution of Wacky Jack V.'s movies so they'll be hard to back up.

The limitation of D-VHS in recording is that you're depending on a tuner to give you signals. 8VSB-broadcast-only (OTA or "over the air") tuners may never be DRM-crippled by the proposed broadcast flag, but satellite and combo HD-OTA/sat tuners are subject to nasty firmware upgrades with Digital Restrictions Managed. It's possible that even OTA-only tuners will be upgraded with MPEG private section data, but that reqires cooperation of broadcasters.

There are also OTA-only HD tuner cards for PCs. Whether there are backdoors for "upgrading" the DRM if the broadcast flag flies is left as an exercise (try SoftICE). The streams that at least one of the cards captured are not "in the clear," which gives you an idea of the mfg.'s intentions. There are no open source drivers for any of these cards working yet. The Telemann "independent developer" project for HiPix requires an NDA to get source access. Teralogic who makes the chip on that board has been bought by Oak, BTW.

• CineFX MDP-100
  
• Digital STREAM HiDTV Pro
  
• Hauppauge WinTV-HD
  
• Cellar Cinemas HiPix DTV-200 HDTV Tuner/Recorder Card

They are out there. Hauppage also has a newer card (the 350) with even more features.

Mail Hauppage (sales@hauppauge.com). Tell them how many you would buy if they would start supporting open source. Be sure to tell them that binary Linux drivers are NOT "support". I want to see these cards working under *BSD, too (that means documentation, not a Redhat-only kernel module).

By the way, I am in no way suggesting that Hauppage is the only company making these things. I just can't think of any others off the top of my head. If you know of others, post below with the relevant links and contact info. Let's get after these hardware companies: I want to build my own DVR, dammit.

Well, a lot of motherboards come with onboard RAID now, in addition to the regular ATA, so you could fit 8 IDE devices on one board.

I wouldn't recommend running more than one drive off an IDE channel, since IDE really doesn't cope well with interleaved data. It's fine if you don't want to access the drives simultaneously, but for RAID it's just plain crazy. My 7200rpm drive lets me right at 5-10MB/s (and it's about 2 years old, technology's probably moved on a little). That's ample for DVD quality video, especially if it's encoded in hardware using something like this card with a built-in MPEG-2 encoder. Which uses 12Mb/s (1.5MB/s) at maximum quality. 4 of these, 4 IDE drives, one per IDE channel should give you ample video bandwidth. You probably wouldn't want to use raid, since then you'd be multiplexing all of the video streams to a single virtual drive, then splitting it to write to the separate drives.

One thing that is important is a large amount of ram. IDE drives often pause for thermal recalibration, which makes them less than ideal for video capture, especially if you want to read from the drive while writting, so a large disk cache is going to be essential.

The WinTV-PVR-250 SP might be a good card for this (about USD 80). Will btaudio do?

Someone is (or was) working on PVR support for XBox Mediaplayer using the WinTV PVR USB. The X-Box got 4 USB inputs (controller ports), so using one of them for this device shouldn't be a problem.

It requries a video signal to record. That said, any kind of signal works (think DVD player powered on). You can feed in any audio signal and so long as the video signal is there. Ripping the braodcast off the Tivo afterwards requires a modded Tivo which can get expensive. I think a combination of a $50 WinTV card and a cron job are his best (and cheapest) bet.

Hauppauge also makes two cards.

Bewere of the AcessDTV card which uses Digital Restriction Mechanisms.

There already are drivers for the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro and the WinTV PVR 250 on the manufacturers' web sites. Try Google.

did you guys noticed whats the channel count on those tuners? i checked out Haupage and All beautiful spanky new radeon. i it found very disturbing that the actual channel count on the tuners is only 125 channels! everyone who has cable knows that theres way more bullshit channels than that!

Good point about AM, I don't think my TV tuner card can do that, but don't know. I have it collecting dust now. I used to for college dorms so I didn't have to lug around a TV in addition to a computer. About recepection. My card, a Hauppage WinTV Theater, has a coax connector for the an antenna (just a long cord) that came with it. So you could string it where ever.

Creative Labs Soundblaster PCI 128

Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-pci, for the video capture.

• • The Hauppauge is used only as the capture card (hardware mpeg encoding) and it comes with a TV Scheduler software. I need the TV Scheduler as there are no Electronic Program Guides (EPG) for my area. The WinTV-PVR-pci card, can do full D1 which has an image size of 704x480 for NTSC video sources or 704x576 for PAL video sources. For the best video image quality, the encoding can use MPEG2 12MB/sec. I also supports the selection of audio languages for special TV programs. (2x Mono tracks, one in French, the second one in English).

Realmagic Xcard that does MPG and DiVX playback.

• • The Xcard can play back MPG and DiVX files using hardware decode. It will only play DiVX files from 4.02 upwards, and it can't handle the DiVX 5.x ¼ pixel motion compensation (QPEL) or global motion compensation (GMC). The Xcard playback supports a resolution of 720x576 at 30fps, with a maximum bit rate of 15Mbps.

Currently, none of the commercial PVR manufacturers support HDTV. So, if you want to record Digital TV, you need to build your own. By the way, Digital TV is great for PVR's, no compression is needed, the TV program is an MPEG2 stream - making the PVR's job easy. This is very similar to the PVR's for DirecTV.

There are a few choices for HDTV PVR cards:
Telemann Hipix - They have a semi-open source project for their Windows drivers. Availability seems to be a problem.
AccessDTV - Has some nice features, like pausing live TV. But, they have some drawkacks - Locked video files, so they can only be played back on the same machine - and their PVR guide is a subscription service.
MyHD - Newer card, some nice features like DVD vob playback (scaled to 1080i or 720p, looks great!)
Hauppage WinTV-HD - Not sure if this is still sold. Not well supported if it is.

Pop one of these into a computer system, add a big hard drive to hold those HD programs (~ 9GB/hr), and off you go.

I use the MyHD card, and I have been using the DVD scaling feature as much as the HDTV reception. I copy my DVD's to the hard drive of my system, and now I have a pretty nice video library, with immediate access - no swapping disks.

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.

Hauppauge has an upcomming 350 that is $100 more, but also has hardware decode as well as S-Video out so you can watch on a TV. Excellent.

Compare models here [hauppauge.com].

-Shane

Is the ATI TV Wonder USB. Anyone have any experience with or feelings about this one? I don't watch enough TV regularly to justtify actually owning a TV, but it's not a medium to which I want to lose access.

*muttermutterdon'twanttomissstartrekmuttermutter *

So given that the ATI USB TV tuner is the same price as Hauppage's but seems to be better feature-wise, does anyone have any grounds on which I shouldn't get it?

Cheers,

Hauppauge has a new card that I've been looking into, and the Navis-Pro is also supposed to be good.

Similar cards were in the thousands of dollars a couple years ago. Now they're around $200... and falling. We're not long before its very easy, very good quality, and very inexpensive. We're not quite there yet though, and for now TiVo and the like and certainly the way to go.

-S

You've read about them in the agreement I hope?

This won't be like region-locked DVD players that become region-free by cutting a jumper. Those can't be sold under the agreement. Waiting for the next Apex to make one without signing the agreement? Watch Congress put the force of law behind this agreement. After all, it isn't being rammed down our throat like the CPDTPA was, no, no, industries agreed (sarcasm) in private action to do this.

CSS wasn't actually that easy to crack. Robust products must be built to resist reverse-engineering so look out for tricks like the Xbox uses (you aren't running Linux on one, so don't tell me that bunnie's crack means much). Code obfuscation, secure busses, yep, it'll all be in your way.

Building your own HD receiver might end up easier. You'll have to get a tuner/QAM decoder that gives up the decoded signal in the clear, but at least open source MPEG-2 decoders are available.

Also, buy your (over-the-air) HD receivers now! They will never be encumbered by this bullshit. Satellite & cable boxes might be recalled, but they can't take away your Samsung SIR-T150 (~$600). Don't buy a combo box (they can update your firmware). Get an OTA-only one. Unencumbered HD tuner cards for PCs are another tech that will soon be out of production & $$$$ on ebay.

-M

Actually, if you are willing to build your own PVR (and I can understand that some aren't), there are quite a few options for timeshifting HDTV content. Namely;

AccessDTV: http://www.accessdtv.com/accessdtv/index.htm
Hauppauge WinTV-HD: http://www.hauppauge.com
Telemann HiPix: http://www.telemann.com/products/dtv200.html

There are quite a few opinions on these cards, and if you are really interested you should be sure to check a more recent one because as the software they use changes, so does the capabilities of the cards. As always, a great resource for all of this is the AVS Forum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ [avsforum.com]

If anyone has tried this card, I love to know what they think of it.

• By the time it became widespread the phone system and components used in various markets were standardized. Right now there is no standardization in the PVR market.
• Phones, eventually, were gov't subsidized as they were considered necessary. PVRs will never be necessary - they are merely a convenience.
• When the phone companies had different standards/protocols their customers had to use their phones (though they did extend that rule well beyond the standardization period). Right now we have different PVR protocols/systems and you must use their equipment. Their equipment could be used seperately from the service, but it takes special knowledge and the results may not be satisfactory (just as with the early phone devices)
• There are many other devices and services which one can use to duplicate much of the functionality of the PVRs without having to deal with TIVO or ReplayTV. Hauppage makes some hardware that is suitable, and much more empowering to the user. There are several TV listing sevices. VCRs have advanced programming capabilities and if all else fails you can use LIRC to connect your VCR to your computer and duplicate all of the functionality.

I'll throw even more info into the mix. Hauppage has 4 PVR products, only one of which is the USB version. It's true it only records at 6Mbps compression (which is a half frame) but you can get one of the three PCI PVR cards from them which do full frame 12Mbps streams. (USB is rated at 12Mbps, but that's not guranteed bandwidth per device including overhead)

I've been looking at the product without an FM radio for $145. I'm turning in my mileage report for the last seven months (2300 miles) so maybe I can convince my wife to let me splurge on one. I'll write a review here if it happens...

BTW, anything has got to be better than the all-in-wonder software from ATI on XP.

-Adam

There are software programmable remote tools available. It's all there. It just needs to be integrated, refined, and made into a distribution.

I believe the Seimens (yes, it's fun to say aloud from your cubicle) card is the same as the Hauppage DVB-S card. Linux support is spotty, but they do support their WinTV cards for SUSE and RedHat. However, either way you'll have to get someone in Europe to ship you a card. It'll be at least 8 months before I deploy to germany, so don't look to me.

What they mean with "Ip over MPEG" is nothing else than IP over DVB - Digital Video Broadcast. DVB is the digital television standard in Europe, and NOKIA is a major player in it, as is Fujitsu-Siemens and others. There exist three DVB transmission styles:

• DVB-T (terrestrial, antenna)
• DVB-C (cable)
• DVB-S (sattelite)

and a similare audio-standard, named DAB - Digital Audio Boradcasting. DAB will replace the FM tuners over the years, and DVB will replace the conventional TV broadcastings.

Still we do not know what "IP over MPEG" is, right ? Well, DVB transmissions consist of a subset of MPEG2. I think this is what they meant with this. I have such a DVB-Card in one of my PCI slots. Together with my USB Host-To-Host bridge, my D-Link NIC this is the third (never asked for, since I use DVB for Television only) network card I have in my system. The DVB standard not only transmits audio/video but also (since we are talking digital, you guessed it...;-)) generic information, as in this case, TCP/IP packets. With this it is possible to use a sattelite (with the SAT version) as network-downstream. This still would require the upstream to go through a conventional method, however. I guess this will change in the next ten years, and DVB will become a standard way to access the Internet...

What is especially interesting are the things going on "behind the scenes", especially from an Open Source point of view:

• NOKIA is a major player/contributor to the MHP - Multimedia Home Platform specification/project.

  MHP is a standard, that will incooperate DVB but make it a real standard. At the moment each broadcaster tries to enforce its own modifications and incompatibilities on the users (Germanies largest broadcaster did so, some French pay-channel did, etc.), just as we know similare practices from M$.

• Now, another important developer of MHP is noone else than Convergence.De AKA LinuxTV.Org, AKA DirectFB (a related project is Diet LibC, for the interested).

  LinuxTV.Org also wrote and/or hosts the important (GPL'ed) software for the DVB cards on Linux, both the v4l compatible TV drivers as well as the IP over MPEG ;-) driver. In addition they host a very cool Linux project, named VDR, which makes a harddisk-video recorder out of any linux compatible PC with one ore more DVB card(s).

BTW: see also DirectFB stuff on Freshmeat and for Gods sake, have a look at this amazing GTK+ desktop with full aplpha blending or the "rootless X Server"(1) (2) or "ten MPEG Videos playing at once, blended, without framedrops". You will find their GTK+ patches here and the DVB stuff here

All in all this is perfect for embedded systems and desktop boxes as well as it will be for full blown deksktops. (Linux desktop without X, digital video and audio broadcast based on free and open standards etc.)

There are several products out there which allow you to use your PC as a TVR and record directly to VCD. Just one example: Hauppauge WinTV-PVR (no affiliation, yadda, yadda).

Anyone tried this product or others like it? Experiences: Good, bad, indifferent?

The HDCP system can't be broken, however, because only high definition sets will have the HDCP decoder, according to Dan McCarron, national product specialist in JVC's color TV division.

• WinAMP
• WinZip
• WinRAR
• WindowBlinds (well, it's not "Windows"...)
• WinTV

Then of course there's X-Windowing System...

Unfortunately, none of these are operating systems - they are all software packages and quite distinct from the OS to most people (er, except for WinTV, which is a hardware card). I seriously doubt "Lindows" has a leg to stand on. (I'd have named it something like "WinOnLin" or something else that gets the idea that it's a Windows emulator running on Linux, Lindows is a pretty dumb name... Although I suppose they could argue Lindows = LINux + WinDOWS, but I doubt that'll fly...)

Regarding PCI cards for HDTV reception,
AccessDTV seems to get the best reviews.

Others are the Hauppauge WinTV-HD and Telemann HiPix-200.

I believe Hauppauge does have an HDTV tuner for the PC:

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/products.htm#digital

You might not like that price though!

Dishnetwork is the only DVB broadcaster in the states. I noticed that Happauge makes an DVB Receiver Card and was curious if anyone has picked up a real, honest-to-God DVB broadcast on a PC? The cards have the capabilities for conditional access modules (smart cards) so everything could be set up legitimately.

Why isn't there more open support for this? You'd think that Dishnetwork would promote this type of thing.

Actually there are WinTV-boards out there with an IR remote control build in.

The WinTV-PVR (which is a specific product, not some generic term like you seem to assume) application WinTV 2K let's you "pause" the live feed.

Granted, the software is complete crap, and the drivers too, but you can do it.

WinTV-HD. $399.00 direct from them.

www.hauppage.com

Short description is here

Nope, they haven't figured out the file format yet. But I'm thinking (gotta check if their guide works in Canada, otherwise I'd have a tivo by now) about getting a Hauppage WinTV PVR which has the ability to archive recorded stuff onto CD-RW in VideoCD format for playback in your average DVD player.

Given a BIOS that lets you Boot A PIII System In .8 Seconds and the Hauppage WinTV PVR card ($249) you could roll your own! Probably for lots less than $1000.

In an earlier post, I speculated that with the recent software upgrade that affected non-subscribers, quite a few people who had beforehand, left TiVo somewhat alone, would start the hacking for real. Looks like this is the case. And before (I haven't read any of the slashdot posts, yet) people start saying how this will bring down TiVo, and its wrong, etc, I would like to present two possible interpretations of this.

One, its self-protection. We can't rely on any company to hold our best interests at heart. Note that I am not saying companies are evil, (tho I think they are, to a certain degree) but that a company is like any other organism. They have their best interests at heart, first and foremost, or they will not be around for long. If TiVo does something inane or goes out of business, there are gonna be a lot of people with dead TiVos. This way, we have a backup plan, that will allow continued use of our TiVo.

Two, I really don't think this will bring down TiVo. If any of the big players, ie, DirectTV, MPAA, etc (possibly even the RIAA, I have recorded some digital music from my cable provider onto my tivo, the jazz music channels and the like) come after TiVo about this, all they would have to do is point to some of the video cards out there that explicitly state that they allow you to capture live tv and record to CDR. I quote from the forum below: "I mean http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr_datasheet.h tm is something much more deadly. From their site: "Watch and record your TV shows with instant replay and program pause. Burn your favorite TV shows onto CD-ROM and play them on your home DVD player Includes hi-performance hardware MPEG2 encoder." Let TiVo point at that if they encounter any legal troubles regarding what people are doing with the hardware. I for one, look forward to implementing this and any other interesting hacks that evolve for this piece of hardware that I own in its entirety.

SealBeater

256M ram - $40

• Radeon (Windows solution) comes with TV on demand software that is free to use thanks to the Guide Plus+(TM) TV listings broadcast in North America.
• Hauppauge WinTV-PVR
• ShowShifter - a Windows-based software package for ATI, Hauppauge, and Matrox capture cards.
• SnapStream (as previously mentioned by someone else
• The Linux solutions can be found at VCR-HOWTO or linuxtv.org