[svlug] TV Tuner card for Linux

[Rick Schultz]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 01:30:42PM -0700, Roland Krause wrote:
> Does anyone here have any alternative recommendations or first hand
> experiences with other cards than the Hauppauges?

I think the AverMedia M179 cards were being closed out at Fry's
recently, for (I think?) around $70 or $80.  I remember reading, though,
that there were two chipset revisions, one of which is well-supported,
the other not so well.  Check the mythtv-users archives.

Me, I'm using a bttv card (WinTV Go, I think).  The colors were a bit
off; I had that "washed out" look I've read about, but adjusting the
brightness and contrast helped a lot.  Now I'm happy enough with it, but
I can't compare it to any other cards.

> Also is mpeg hardware encoding really necessary? The machine this baby
> would go into is a MicroATX with an AMD XP 3000 and 512 Megs of ram,

Then no.  I'm running MythTV on an XP-M 2600+, and it has loads of room
to spare.  I even switched to software MPEG-4 encoding so the files
would be smaller, and recording still doesn't hit 50% usage.

> I am not afraid of hacks to get this all working smoothly either but in
> the end the system has to pass the "wife" test. 

Well, the only complaints I've gotten were about MPEG artifacts in the
F1 races.  Admittedly, I selected a bitrate based on how well Adult Swim
looked.  If appearances are an issue, I can recommend the SilverStone
case with the IR window - compared to the breadboard I had sitting on
top of the old case, it's a big improvement to the WAF.

good luck,
rick