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In the UK, we have Freeview "digital" TV. The old analog terrestial signals were shut down and everyone forced to get a digital decoder box for reception. They also had to get a larger aerial plus signal amplifier. The good side was that you could get dozens of channels, but these varied from region to region as different transmitters carry different stations.

Linux does have digital TV and you need a USB DVB-T signal converter in order to receive and record video on a Linux PC. That requires a channel scan to be done first (w_scan).
https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/i...

Some USB receivers have mini antennae, but I've never found them to work in any location, not even in the countryside or a downtown hotel.

cx88 PCI cards

http://corona.homeunix.net/cx8...

https://gist.github.com/dreamc...

xc5000 USB device)

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Webca...

Requires dvb-fe-xc5000-1.6.114.fw firmware

https://www.linuxtv.org/downlo...

MythTV

http://www.freshports.org/mult...

2 head VCRs are SP only. 4 head VCRs add two heads for EP. If all of your content is SP then a 2 head VCR should suffice. Depending upon the quality of the audio you want to present you might consider either stereo or Hi-Fi. Whatever VCR you choose should have manual tracking adjustment.

For capturing content on a Windows box I cannot recommend the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 highly enough. That capture card should also be compatible with MythTV.

The output from my current consumer grade 4 head Panasonic Omnivision (mono audio) VCR was friggin amazing. My wife had a selection of out of print VHS tapes and I captured them with that card. She was missing one tape and while searching for it I found a three pack of DVDs, one of which matched what she was missing and two of which matched what she had. I had to look at the output frame by frame to see if there was any perceptible difference between the Hauppauge output and the DVD. There was none.

Even with normal recordings from home there can be issues with the picture quality. If you have problems with the video becoming lighter and darker that my not be a copy protection issue (obviously as you are working with home movies). Consider purchasing a Digital video stabilizer. The guys at the electronics repair shop nearby recommend ones by MCM Electronics to help mitigate transfer issues.

Tossing your MPEG-2 output from the Hauppauge through the NLE of your choice might help with noise reduction (I use NeatVideo> and color skew. YMMV.

Take a look at the call for which ENOENT was returned. The API spec says "EINVAL: The struct v4l2_queryctrl id is invalid. The struct v4l2_querymenu id is invalid or index is out of range (less than minimum or greater than maximum) or this particular menu item is not supported by the driver."

This is from a generic driver mechanism for USB camera-like devices. Because such devices aren't as standard as they should be, there's an insane number of options and possible errors. The spec says to return EINVAL for both incorrect calls and calls for which the device does not support the requested item.

The problem here is that the EINVAL error status doesn't distinguish between "program made bad call and is broken" and "we're iterating through the device functions to discover which ones are available, and this ID isn't meaningful on this device so skip it" EINVAL is supposed to mean "One or more of the ioctl parameters are invalid or out of the allowed range." A correctly made call should not return EINVAL.

The alternatives are limited, though. This is related to a historical Linux design problem, which comes from a historical UNIX problem - system call errors are reported using one error code, chosen from a short list written in the 1970s. "ENOENT" isn't really appropriate. "ENOTTY" ("The ioctl is not supported by the driver"), might be appropriate, except that the usual message for that is "Not a typewriter".

The API is a rather lame and excessively complex way to return what is merely a variable-length list of fixed-format structures. One would think that Linux would by now have a generic way to do that, since it comes up in other contexts.

Here's an example of an application which seems to be crashing because the programmer did not understand the nonstandard semantics of EINVAL in this API.

Someone with more recent experience should answer this since, as I said somewhere up above, I haven't used one of these in a while. That said, several of the USB Microscopes I've used work as fairly standards-compliant webcams, particularly (IIRC) with GSPCA and V4L support.

What you won't get on linux is support for computer controlled focus, enabling and disabling lights or any other features that the microscopes have, unless they have explicit linux tools bundled, which some may have, but I have not worked with any so I can't say specifically.

Nor should MythTV support either of those. The LinuxTV project provides hardware support. MythTV will use (with a couple exceptions) any card supported by one of the V4L, DVB, or IVTV APIs.

PCs have had TV cards for quite some time, and the experience with them is very uneven, it depends on how knowledgeable you are in setting them up, and the quality of the TV card you buy, casual attempts often end up with horrendously fuzzy SDTV.

Mythtv is a bitch to set up (though there are customized distributions for it), but once properly installed, the results are fantastic. There are no more analogue transmissions here in .fi, so you get an unprocessed MPEG2-TS source from the DVB transmission, which while being SDTV (PAL, so 768x576, interlaced) looks great with a proper deinterlacer (I prefer Yadifx2) even in 1080p. From what I gather, the US is moving away from analogue transmissions as well, so fuzzy image quality should not be an issue anymore.

As a matter of fact a Mythtv-based DVR with digital inputs is in many ways superior to hardware alternatives; adding more storage is trivial, multiple frontends (or backends) can be configured, streaming and managing recordings via the web and so on. One of the major benefits over hardware is that most have two tuners, and allow recording two channels from different multiplexes, plus perhaps live TV from either multiplex. In Mythtv there are no such artificial restrictions, a single tuner can tune to a single multiplex, but can record several streams from said multiplex. I have two tuners and have configured both to have five "virtual tuners", so technically I can record ten channels simultaneously - not that I ever do, there's never that much to watch at any given time.

And digital transmissions have one major advantage over analogue ones - there's no need to do any processing on the signal, simply store it to a disk. Thus the needed processing power is negligible, even on my ancient backend running on an Athlon XP 2600+ recording multiple channels never puts processor usage over 5%. So if you have spare time and patience (plus preferably some Linux experience), an ION-based nettop (Mythtv supports VDPAU noways so the playback is hardware accelerated, ION will happily play back even 1080p H264 without killing the processor), a couple of USB tuners suitable for your location and a spacier external hard drive, combined with a suited distribution will be a much more versatile DVR solution than any hardware one I've yet met - I recon this applies to GTV as well, but we'll see. But as said, the setup process can be painful. The results are well worth it IMHO.

after 3-4 years of mythtv I found VDR, and it's everything myth is supposed to be.
if you're using dvb-s/t/c it's perfect, notice that it springs from the linuxtv project itself. it's also super fast, channel switching is faster than my set-top box.
and if you need grey-area tools to use your legit subscription services there are plenty of tools available, and most of all you can talk about it freely in the forums, as opposed to the mythtv mailing lists.
for the media player part, I use xbmc

What problems are you seeing?

You need to build the drivers from source for any of the latest cards and 8.04. I have an identical setup.

Follow these instructions:

http://www.linuxtv.org/repo/

Wow. I thought the point of DVR was to be able to say "I like nine o'clock news, anything by Alfred Hitchcock and The Shield, please record those"... You're saying the service provided devices don't do that? Pretty crappy, I say.

I built myself a VDR box several years ago (as a cool project) and ended up with a media system that's been "Good Enough" so far -- but I have to say I thought commercial offerings would have far surpassed that feature set by now.

Yes, indeed. You can even run it under Linux.

Grab a $50 USB adapter and the aforementioned rabbit ears, hey presto this 'digital TV' appears on your PC.

And why would I pay for DVB tuners when my stupid cable company (UPC) has its own thoughts about how to deliver their digital stuff? Smartcards are restricted to their own decoders: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Netherlands#UPC
so I still would have to rent an extra settopbox anyway.

My next tv would not need to have any tuners if it was up to me. It just has to act as a monitor for a decent machine with enough slots to contain a couple of dvb-s cards suppoted by vdr: http://www.linuxtv.org/vdrwiki/index.php/Introduction for in the living room.

It also can provide multiple streams (depending on the number of cards and what channels are on the same transponder) to place/time-shift, it made watching tv bearable again.

> any tuner device supported by linux should be usable with mythtv so if you find a USB tuner with linux support you can use it

MythTV is modular. You do the tuning/recording/processing on the backend, which talks to the frontend (display) via the network. These functions can be on the same box, but with the PS3 as a frontend, you would want a separate backend.

http://linuxtv.org/ has info on supported devices. My tuner of choice is the HDHomeRun, a network based dual HD tuner.

From the DVB wiki page I would guess that your card is the last AVerMedia card on the list, it seems to indicate that you'll only get analog tuning at best. I did also find this aswell which might mean you'll get better luck if you can follow what was done there. If it can be made to work (which is possible since the chips it uses are used by other cards aswell), then I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before it'll work out of the box. My Pinnacle PCTV MediaCenter 300i was a bitch to get working when I first got it, but works out of the box with the last 3/4 kernel releases.

It is a pain to have to jump through hoops to get these things working, but it is the fault of the hardware company especially since they have already written drivers which they could and perhaps should (if they used code from the V4L project to make the drivers) be open source.

From the DVB wiki page I would guess that your card is the last AVerMedia card on the list, it seems to indicate that you'll only get analog tuning at best. I did also find this aswell which might mean you'll get better luck if you can follow what was done there. If it can be made to work (which is possible since the chips it uses are used by other cards aswell), then I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before it'll work out of the box. My Pinnacle PCTV MediaCenter 300i was a bitch to get working when I first got it, but works out of the box with the last 3/4 kernel releases.

It is a pain to have to jump through hoops to get these things working, but it is the fault of the hardware company especially since they have already written drivers which they could and perhaps should (if they used code from the V4L project to make the drivers) be open source.

See http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB_USB

MythTV running on pcHDTV-3000 and are a killer combination for viewing and recording HDTV on Linux. Even unencrypted QAM is supported.

The pcHDTV forum is very informative if you want to set up your own PVR on Linux.

For supported cards under linux see http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATSC_cards

I don't think the ATI is supported unless underneath it's accually using an off the shelf chip. I guess that's possible, but I didn't see that card mentioned on the Wiki.

I have an Athlon 3200+ and I can watch live 1080i TV using a simple 'mplayer dvb://stationname' command. Myth seems to put a little overhead on it and the picture breaks up a little. My understanding is if I recompile with PREEMPT this should help clean up things.

It strange that it requires a MPEG *de*coder. Decoding doesn't seem to require that much power as long as I'm using XvMC (Motion compensation support in hardware). ......So it seems that "soft" DVR's with support for HD is still a little behind in the Windows world. My only complaint is that the Linux software doesn't support all the extended programming information that is carried in the TS. Not too big a deal though since the PVR software holds redundant information except for closed caption data.

Check out the information on www.linuxtv.org. There is more than the HD-3000 now for ATSC reception. If I recall there is a card called the Air2pc with a 3rd generation ATSC receiver on it.

Another way to record HD programs is if your cable company enabled the Firewire port on your cable box. Mythtv supports recording via Firewire.

Building your PVR is much easier if you are using VDR with one of the numerous VDR distributions that are based on Debian, Gentoo or SuSE. Check out the English version of the VDR-Wiki for information on hardware, installations etc.

Lio

I built my own HTPC using a gutted out DVD player as the case. My recommendation to anyone doing this would be to get a DVB card (either DVB-S if you have Satellite, DVB-C if you have cable, or DVB-T for terrestrial broadcasts.) This way you can get the MPEG stream straight into your PC and onto your HDD - no horrible analog capturing and MPEG encoding to mess with! For those with a graphics card or MB with digital video output, you can cut the analog side of things all together.

There's another option on the software side of things if you go this way too, take a look at VDR (http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr/). There are no shortage of plugins, including support for using a remote copy of xine as an output device.

More info on Digital TV under linux is available at http://www.linuxtv.org/

I had a quick poke around their support site and found this, along with some instructions on using it with the LinuxTV.org drivers here.

Hopefully the quality of the card itself will mean more people developing for it over time. It's also nice to see the manufacturers promoting development for this card too.

The standard in used in most of Europe for digital terrestial broadcast is DVB-T (DVB-S, DVB-C are used for satellite and cable). It's possible to run HDTV video over these.

Also as far as I'm aware most other countries have adopted DVB-T for digital terrestial signals with a few exceptions.

As for if it has any mystic Broadcast flags defined, I couldn't really say, I've only looked at the standards concerning new information encoded into the MPEG-TS stream (epg and such). There however is a variety of tuner cards that work in linux. Xine and mplayer have support for them and xawtv 4 will have a software mpeg-2 decoder for this use.

I believe the standards are available for download at http://www.etsi.org/

See http://www.linuxtv.org/ for the drivers.

Ok, here's some tuners that will work on Linux.

First of all, check out this site to get the dvb drivers. For ease of use, they also have a patched kernel tree in CVS you can pull down and compile.

Second, if you're a non DirectTV satellite customer, you can get HDTV sat streams if your provider conforms to the DVB-S standard (ie not DirectTV). Or, if you're in Europe and your standard cable provider conforms to the DVB-C standard, you're in luck as well. Snap up one of the TechnoTrend cards from here. These have been reported to work with MythTV.

Now, for us in America and some other select countries, we're out of luck in the cable market.
We've seemed to create another standard called OpenCable that the big boys like Time Warner are using.

As of right now there are no OpenCable cards available for Windows or Linux. The best we can do is OTA ATSC...

We have a setup working on VideoLan working with Kfir hardware encoders and Aminet 103s from Amino Commnuications (STB's) working with 2 MBits!! Each costs about USD 200.

• UML
• ipsec
• ebtables & bridge-netfilter
• robert love's preemptable patch
• LSM-hooks (which make not everybody happy:grsecurity, RSBAC
• LS-module SE-linux
• filesystem-encryption
• apci 2.5 backports
• Kernel .config
• DVB-support

They must have beaten up Linus to get all those accepted ...

/graf0z.

There have been digital TV cards with open source Linux support for years. This may be the first card for the ATSC standard and doesn't even have an MPEG decoder, or why would the need xine.
Do they support the Linux DVB API, or at least the parts that are common in ATSC and DVB?
Are the drivers open source?

For more information on linux and digital TV see
LinuxTV
Metzlerbros
and links on those sites.

What people need to realise is that a computer is not like their microwave or tv. A computer doesn't come with all those limits in what they can do. Therefore, a computer must also be more complicated to use.

I have to mainly agree with you. Although I believe that most people want their computer to be more like a tv. Convergence will eventually turn the PC into an appliance.

Honestly, they are 1/4 the price of any of these machines, and do a much better job of archiving shows, as they record the raw MPEG-2 stream from the satellite.

That and most of the companies keep all their specs and libraries open.

Oh, and they usually work in Linux, too. Plus there's PVR software for them, and I don't think the authors are about to remove features like ReplayTV.

Something to think about...

Disclaimer: I have not created a "homebrew" TiVO.
Now, having said that I would like to point you to this link, where you can find a nifty linux project. Let me know if it works for you!

a tivo-like device, another, and linuxtv.org. That should be enough to get you started...

Get the Nova-T version instead, it already has LinuxTV support, including full multiplex capture so you can record the original 4/5 MPEG2 channels with in the transport stream.

The Nebula board is also going to get Linux support pretty soon apparently.

Well in the specs the mention MPEG2, DVB compatible.
DVB page is http://www.dvb.org

A linux group working with some DVB cards can be found at http://www.linuxtv.org/dvb/

I haven't looked into it for a while but I don't think DISH or DirecTV use a pure DVB compatible signal, but I may be wrong.

Where's the support for a DVB-C card for HTV? ;-)

Sounds like a job for VideoLAN and perhaps maybe also LinuxTV.

I thought the region codes were handled by the DVD drive, not by the software or drivers. That's why the the regionset tool for Linux exists, no?

My brother and I wrote a linux kernel driver for the em8400 chip, i.e. Netstream card, for convergence (see this link and this one). The driver implements the linux DVB API (described at linuxtv.org), but we can't publish anything because of NDA agreements with Sigma Designs. The card is very nice and has a very good MPEG decoder. I don't see why they don't want it published as open source.

Where's the disadvantage? The Siemens DVB cards which VDR uses are great. First of all, there are high quality, well documented open source Linux drivers for them, and secondly, the TV-out quality beats any graphics card. It's even better than most standalone DVD players. If you have a Rev. 1.3 card, you even have RGB out. Not to mention that these cards have a hardware MPEG2-Decoder on board, so you can use a low-power CPU with a passive cooler.

One thing to bear in mind is that there are really not many "standard" APIs in the Linux world, other than perhaps the POSIX calls and X, ie the legacy of the commercial unix heritage. The rest works on an evolutionary basis - the survival of the fittest. This means you use the best API for your needs. If it's not currently installed then the software manager will auto-install the dependancies (well in theory, yes i know that doesn't always work but that's nor relevant and being resolved anyway).

Also remember that Linux DVD support is pretty new. Being non-commercial, support for it had to be reverse engineered, so there may not have been enough time yet for a complete set of DVD APIs to emerge. It'll happen though, have no doubt, though I couldn't say what it'll be like or when.

Why worry about having the OS do it for you...why not look for a MPEG2 encoder card like the LinuxTV card. Or even some of the complete solutions that allow you to capture directly to a dedicated harddrive.

These are commonly used in digital video production and are how most film -> digital transfers are performed today.

LinuxTV works with DVB boards, since it manages the raw MPEG transport stream from DTV you don't have to mess about capturing or compressing or loose any quality.

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.)

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.)

Could Mono kill Gnome

I sure as hell don't know but I'm pretty sick of watching the redundancy in Linux. Sure, most of it has a purpose but I might be able to use the damn software if people made sacrifices for the sake of getting a desktop product out. I'm not trying to start a flame war about whether it is good enough for *your* desktop or not so please don't start.

What I would love to see is everyone who is working on anything remotely redundant to drop what they are doing, put their collective heads together and come up with a real competitor for Microsoft in something *other* than the server market. I don't care if it is a desktop product or an TV/entertainment product.

There are too many unfinished products and not enough of One Good Thing.

BTW - I mentioned the TV thing because I am currently building a home theater PC that has caused me much grief. I see that both Microsoft and the Linux community are addressing the market.

10 to 1 odds that Microsoft finishes a product that everyone buys and bitches about while the Linux product stays in beta stage for years to come.

Sigh...

This message has been brought to you by the department of the redundancy department.

Two things, I'm also playing around with Linux based PVR's, (my own effort just started) and peer to peer stuff. I even do it for a living. I agree that pirating is illegal, however, I don't think you are going to stop it. I think that the only way to fix the problem is to change the way products and services are advertised. Instead of commercial breaks, the shows are going to have to integrate the commercials with the programming itself. IE have captain of enterprise drink coca-cola, or just make money on the selling of Enterprise products (stuffed starship). The same model that Nick, PBS, etc. uses. They make all their money on merchandise.

There is an open source PVR/Linux tv at linuxtv.org, but that does mostly euro standards. I'm just starting a new effort at Linux HDTV which is an effort to set up a HDTV PVR.

Check out http://www.linuxtv.org or http://www.linuxdvb.tv for information about the DVB project, which is attempting to develop Linux digital-TV apps/drivers as well as to keep digital TV open.

Note that the company formed to develop the DVB driver (Convergence) is in financial difficulty and could fold soon.

Given that Linux is an obvious choice for set-top-boxes, and that many manufacturers want to make their own implementations closed (although the DVB standard seems to be prevailing at the moment), this could be the venue for a future battleground between open and closed source.

mtb

DVB is more common in Europe I guess.

I have the "biggest" Hauppauge DVB card, the WinTV-DVBs in my box. This is the card for sattelite broadcasts. A WinTV-DVBc exists as well which is for cable.

I use it daily. Linux support is nice !There are several projects around this family of cards (since they are all built on the same reference design, you can even exchange their software and driver on Windows I have been told). The card I am talking has hardware decoding of the media-stream. There exists a smaller one from Hauppauge which does the decoding with the CPU.

• The main site. Hosts the driver, has implemented the MHP (together with NOKIA, opensourced), and has references to the VDR project (see third link)
• the DVB driver for Linux (download page)
• Linux Video Recorder (DVB) (German, very detailed instrctions on setup and build.
• The VDR main-site
• Since the VDR was built to use the TV-Out the picture will go there. However, since they use the V4L interfaces one can use xawtv, KTV (or so) as well as the specialized Kvdr (which brings the complete VDR to the desktop). It is here (as well as an IPoverIEEE1394 and DV backup project)
• Extensions for the VDR
• VDR-NFSroot (also interesting)
• Resource and FAQ site
• Site of general DVB-s interest
• Now this guy has a dish in his garden that has several meters in diameter :-) (WARNING: for freaks)
• On EfNet IRC there is a channel #LinuxDVB. It is in German but since all Germans (well most) talk english they will help out for sure.

All in all I can say, that this is well supported and heavily used, at least in Germany. MPlayer is going to get DVB support soon (they will use its MPEG decoder for MPEG decoding).

I do not use the card for data-services, however, there is a driver for this on the drivers main-site. DVB data is one-way, so one still needs to have a modem connection open for upstream. I have been told that due to the whole continent using two or three providers the resources (bandwidth) on the sattelite is very used and xfer rates drop easily down to ISDN speed). So I would not recommend this (unless your family has rented their own transpoder).

There are people who have two or three of these cards in a small footprint Linux box, that they access over http or ssh and which is hooked to the TV. Along with some big drives they use it solely as VCR with timeshifting and also for DVD and MP3 playback (which is possible). The VDR project is LIRC compatible and has support for the WinTV-DVBs rev 2.1 IR control as well

DVB is more common in Europe I guess.

I have the "biggest" Hauppauge DVB card, the WinTV-DVBs in my box. This is the card for sattelite broadcasts. A WinTV-DVBc exists as well which is for cable.

I use it daily. Linux support is nice !There are several projects around this family of cards (since they are all built on the same reference design, you can even exchange their software and driver on Windows I have been told). The card I am talking has hardware decoding of the media-stream. There exists a smaller one from Hauppauge which does the decoding with the CPU.

• The main site. Hosts the driver, has implemented the MHP (together with NOKIA, opensourced), and has references to the VDR project (see third link)
• the DVB driver for Linux (download page)
• Linux Video Recorder (DVB) (German, very detailed instrctions on setup and build.
• The VDR main-site
• Since the VDR was built to use the TV-Out the picture will go there. However, since they use the V4L interfaces one can use xawtv, KTV (or so) as well as the specialized Kvdr (which brings the complete VDR to the desktop). It is here (as well as an IPoverIEEE1394 and DV backup project)
• Extensions for the VDR
• VDR-NFSroot (also interesting)
• Resource and FAQ site
• Site of general DVB-s interest
• Now this guy has a dish in his garden that has several meters in diameter :-) (WARNING: for freaks)
• On EfNet IRC there is a channel #LinuxDVB. It is in German but since all Germans (well most) talk english they will help out for sure.

All in all I can say, that this is well supported and heavily used, at least in Germany. MPlayer is going to get DVB support soon (they will use its MPEG decoder for MPEG decoding).

I do not use the card for data-services, however, there is a driver for this on the drivers main-site. DVB data is one-way, so one still needs to have a modem connection open for upstream. I have been told that due to the whole continent using two or three providers the resources (bandwidth) on the sattelite is very used and xfer rates drop easily down to ISDN speed). So I would not recommend this (unless your family has rented their own transpoder).

There are people who have two or three of these cards in a small footprint Linux box, that they access over http or ssh and which is hooked to the TV. Along with some big drives they use it solely as VCR with timeshifting and also for DVD and MP3 playback (which is possible). The VDR project is LIRC compatible and has support for the WinTV-DVBs rev 2.1 IR control as well