Tv-Tuner advice looking at building a mythtv box

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Gruntboy50 · Post by **Gruntboy50** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 10:40 pm

i have done some searching in the forums, and on google. However, i have a few questions. I currently own a Ati Wonder VE tv tuner card. It does seem to be supported by the Bt878 drivers. I have a pc laying around but it doesnt have a tv out on the video card. This is fine for me because i simply want to record shows and then watch them on my laptop or wherever. In fact this thing will sit in another room largly unattended. I tried expirimenting to get the tv-tuner card working and all i got was xawtv to give me a black screen and all in all it was unresponsive. Is there a how to or a nice laid out tips and tricks on setting up a tv-tuner card. It seemed to quickly turn into a hassle. Any success stories? Pit falls i need to watch. I wont be able to mess with it for another week but all in all i like to read and learn about it in the mean time. BTW the system did recoginize it as a connected device. Just appeared that xawtv was being extremely tempormental. is there a better program, or will Myth take care of it.

servo888 · Post by **servo888** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 11:51 pm

Avoid bt878 tuner cards, unless your packing heavy cpu power and loads of storage. I would highly suggest a Hauppauge PVR, because of their great linux support and hardware mpeg encoding.

Just my 2 cents; fyi I run a mythtv on a 450 p3, with a bt878, the files are unmanagable - since I can't do OTF software encoding, I have to use transcode to get the huge nupplevideo files down to something managable =-(.

digitalb0y · Post by **digitalb0y** » Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:34 pm

Do you want Analog or HDTV or DVB?

For the Best Grneral Tv tuner cards Hauppauge has a good selection

WinTv-PVR 150,250,350 are great, I use an WinTv-PVR 250

http://www.hauppauge.com/Pages/compare_pvr.html

For HDTV (North Amercia Standard)
check out HD-3000 card (Terestial only)
http://pchdtv.com

For Digitial Video Broadcasting DVB (Europe Standard)

Check out the hauppauge Nexus-S for Satilite
the Nova - T for DVB-T (Terestial)

ColeSlaw · Post by **ColeSlaw** » Thu Jan 20, 2005 5:18 am

I also use the WinTv-PVR 250. I recommend it to anybody wanted to watch TV in linux. Lots of great tutorials for it, lots of great support, and great picture quality. Plus hardware encoding... tough to beat this one...