TV Card Recommendation

[Charlie Lewis]

On Sunday 24 April 2005 04:12 pm, Simon Santoro wrote:
> Simon Taplin wrote:
> > Can anybody recommend a good TV card that works with Hoary.
> >
> > Simon
>
> Have a look at this
> http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2005-April/031160.html
> thread

Tack in here and add my two cents to what Simon said to Simon since I seem to 
have lost Simon's original post to reference what Simon Said. ;-)

Anyway, I'll echo most every thing on the thread that Simon said to read after 
having read it. I think I said that right.

Simon, not particularly plugging Hauppage, but most of my experience has been 
with Hauppage since in my part of the world they seem to be the most readily 
available, so with that said, I've got one of the Hauppage WinTV-Go-Fm cards 
which I've had since sometime back around 1997 or so. I recall the first 
Linux distro I used it on was Caldera OpenLinux 1.3, so you might figure by 
that how old it is. The first application I used it with was KwinTV that was 
shipped with that version of Caldera, but it worked well with the version of 
Xawtv that was available then also. I used the ncurses radio app for my FM 
Tuner option until I found Gradio and then later Gnomeradio. It's worked with 
very little configuration and most time none at all with every Linux distro 
I've ever tried and that has been a few. It has the bttv878 chip and the 
Phillips FM1236 tuner. Hauppage recently came out with a later model of the 
WinTV-Go that uses the 881 chip and a friend of mine has had problems getting 
it to work on a couple of Mandrake Release Candidates he is playing with and 
I've piddle with it to no avail except on one occasion I got it to work for 
about two hours until he rebooted, so I don't know for sure on the 881.

I've got a WinTV-PVR250 which I've got to work on one Debian Sid Release with 
a lot of configuring, compiling and building of the ivtv drivers,
http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/
using mplayer for an interface and doing a lot of the exotic which needs to be 
done with MythTV or other exotic interface which integrates Xmltv station 
grabbing and scheduling stuff along with database, and will handle the MPEG 
stuff which Xawtv, and the ordinary frame grabber stuff. It's a lot of work 
for just watching TV for someone who isn't really hip on nor capable of doing 
a lot of computer gymnastics in Linux like extracting and loading firmware 
and what have you. The WinTV-PVR350 is essentially the same card except it 
has hardware MPEG video decoding.

I have a WinTV-PVR-usb (note not the usb 2) that I got to work once with Linux 
using the 
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pvrusb/
which hasn't had any work done on it since 2002 and seems development on it 
has stopped. It was raw and attached it's self to /dev/usb/lp0 for some 
reason, but that is the way the fellow who wrote it wrote it, so I don't know 
his reasoning. ;-)

I've got a really cheap ATI TV Wonder that I use on one Ubuntu box that has my 
VCR and a DVDRom player inlined so that it sets on default channel 3 and 
never needs to be changed once it is tuned and set and works off the VCR 
remote except for shut down of the actual frame grabber interface like Xawtv, 
so I don't get the problem with it I've had with it in other systems of being 
about a channel off on NTSC us-cable, and it will not mute audio (uses a line 
out that connects to line in on soundcard) so I had to write a script that 
unmutes or mutes Alsa turning it on or off. Other than that it works okay 
with Xawtv, TvTime, Zapping etc.  

I've been thinking about recompiling the ivtv and doing the mythtv stuff on 
the other Ubuntu Hoary box in which the TV Wonder is in to see if I get it go 
on Ubuntu. Just don't ever seem to have all the time I want.

HTH

Charlie