TV Tuner Cards For Unix?

Marooned asks: "I've been wondering what a good TV tuner card would be, preferably with good Linux compatability (preferably working under 2.4). Yes, someone already asked about this but it was a while ago, but he got few replies. There are a lot more options now (ATI Radeon All-in-One, GeForce w/tvout, etc.), and since we're all richer and wiser now (than when the first article was posted, I wanted to know if anyone can recommend a good card to go along with my SBLive! and Cambridge DTT 3500. Any takers? (Advice on a DVD drive would be welcome too)" Most of the video features on these cards are supported, but I'm not quite sure as to the extent of Linux support available for the TV tuning features on today's cards.

Comments

BT848 works great for me

[ikekrull]

My cheap-ass BT848 card has worked since the heady days of the 2.0 kernel, and never given any trouble. Its supported under 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.

Mostly i use mine for capturing frames for claymation from various video cameras. XawTV provides realtime preview and image capture, and i use a couple of little shell scripts and command line tools to turn a folder full of individual frames into an MPG or AVI file.

I also use XawTV to watch TV both on the root window and in smaller mini-windows.

Only mono audio, but you can use an external tuner - i.e. VCR and just use the capture card as a composite/SVideo input.

Be sure you have a main video card that supports external overlay (most modern PCI/AGP cards do, though there are some that are a pain in the ass)

The BT8x8 cards are not particularly suited to capturing video of any length, since they have no hardware compression, and reliable realtime software MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MJPEG compression is not viable, AFAIK under Linux (Maybe the Alpha's vector processor would make this possible?)

If youre looking for a card to capture video, look for something a little more pwerful with an onboard hardware compresion engine.

I also have an Iomega Buz which is now supported under Linux - this will MJPEG compress your video in realtime, enabling you to capture full-frame, 25/30fps PAL/NTSC video at a rate of around 3-5MB/second. The Miro DC10+ is also supported i believe, and there are other cards which are supported by the manufacturers - Someone help me out here.

Uncompressed capture will most likely use at least twice this much space, if your drives can handle that kind of sustained rate.

ATI All-In-Wonder Products

[aidoneus]

Personally, from my experience I'd reccomend an ATI All-In-Wonder product (I have an AIW PRo, the Radeon is a dream right now). When I first started using it over a year and a half ago, the drivers were buggy, but now I've found that Gatos has done a great job putting together solid and easy to use tuner support. Check ATI for the link, or The Linux Video Project for the newest drivers. ATI actually points to xfree pages.

-Jason

Re:TV Tuner cards

[Brama]

I recently bought a WinTV Theater tv card. The tuner on this card is very good, certainly comparable with TV quality reception. If you have a tv-out you probably wouldn't notice the difference with a 'real' tv picture. You can capture full-screen NTSC (640x480) or full-screen PAL (756x384) depending on your tuner. This particular card has stereo audio support, which it can transform into 5.1 surround sound audio.

I used to have a FlyVideo2 Bt848 tv card, but its tuner quality was not good. Hard drives spinning would interfere with the signal, for example. I've seen a few other cards with this problem as well, all being low-budget ones. You should probably avoid those.

Software support for this (and any other bt878/bt848 based) card is excellent. I prefer it over the (rather bad) windows software shipped with it. Stuff like auto-tuning, s-band, color/ contrast/brightness control is well supported. Xawtv is a very good program to use as a tv viewer. qtvidcap (video grabber for X), which comes with avifile is nice as well. VCR is a text-console capture program similar to qtvidcap (I wrote it using qtvidcap's capture code). You can find all these programs on freshmeat.

A Whole Lotta Replies

[Peale]

I don't see anything of value here, so I'll add my own .02

I've got the Hauppauge WinTV GO! card. Works based on the BT878 chipset. This card goes for around $50 or so. Mono sound, but you can upgrade to better versions. Or, do what I did and pipe the feed into your Hi-Fi VCR and go from the VCR's audio out to your sound cards line in. Takes care of the sound issues!

The BT878 option is in the kernel tree, albiet quite hidden. You have to enable (IIRC) I7C(?) support, and then it is available under Video4Linux options.

Sorry I can't be more helpful as to what option you have to enable, I'm at my in-laws for the weekend, and have only built one 2.4 series kernel.

If you're going to be doing any video capturing, go for one of the more expensive cards, as the WinTV will only cap at 320x240.

Hope I've given some food for thought. Good luck!