[ILUG] Good analogue capture card for use with MythTV

[Michael Watterson]

Cian Davis wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
>
> Hi All,
> I'm looking for a standard analogue capture card that works well with
> MythTV and I can actually buy. I have 2 versions of an saa7134 that
> have various problems such as not changing channels, problems with
> audio etc etc.
>
> Ideally, I would like it to have MPEG2 encoding on-board but the media
> centre has a dual-core Athlon-64 so it's not critical. Main thing is
> for it to work with the minimum hassle.
>
> The interwebs is not giving me straight answers, not on the cards I
> can actually get anyway....
>
> Any suggestions?
>   
The main problem seems to be Myth TV. I've had similar problems with Sat 
Cards too.

I have original type Sat card with MPEG2 decoder on board, later version 
of basic tuner only card and DVB-S2 cards. Various commonly supported 
popular analogue tuner/ video in also. All except an MPEG1/CDi/ISA card 
work on Win98/Win2000/XP and all except the DVB-S2 and MPEG1/CDi card 
(dates from Win 3.1 pre Linux era) work on NT4.0 also.

Even audio cards on linux you seem to have to have mutually exclusive 
bits for different applications.

Ultimately I found that the cheapest  high  quality  Analog  capture 
(not tuner) was a second hand Digital-8 Sony that can play 8mm analogue 
tapes and act as a Analogue to Firewire bridge.

Linux may be a good choice for an embedded system Set-box receiver, but 
I'd not use Windows as a Setbox unless I was very desperate (a 99 Euro 
DVD recorder with analog in & analogue tuner from Dunnes works better, 
or a DVB receiver from 80 Euro for watching TV makes any PC system look 
stupid in terms of usability and quality. HDD PVRs are now more 
reasonable too from under 300 Eur). Linux is still MUCH worse than XP 
with best 3rd party SW or built in MCE edition for Video.

the only thing that seems better on Linux in support (assuming you can 
get the Sat Card working) is VLC to stream on LAN direct from Satcard. 
On XP I do it by feeding analogue s-video from main graphics card 
displying sat TV and looping that with external cable to an ordinary 
Hauppauge WinTV PCI card as video source for VLC. On Linux I can't get 
ANY of my 7 models of cards to work on any distro... so the "better" VLC 
support is moot.

Also 64 bit versions Linux last time I looked a while ago (may have 
improved) didn't even support a driver for Sat card or TV analogue card. 
With  a regular i386 non-64bit (plain non-Ubuntu Debian I think, at 
least I managed to get a driver to load for the 
Technotrend/Techinsat/Hauppauge Basic DVB-s card. Didn't work though.

-- 
Mike