> What are the experience and recommendations of the
> list about TV tuner card. I plan to buy one and use on
> gnu-linux. i believe one can also do conversion across
> medias i.e. VHS to CD etc.
The Pinnacle TV tuners give the best quality. And they are quite widely
supported on Linux and Windows. I have a Pixelview TV tuner, and I find it
ok, nothing great.
The following part is completely OT, but still ;)
In case you haven't used a TV tuner card, then here are my observations:
1. Linux supports most of them, but the apps under linux leave a lot of room
for improvement.
2. The best app that I found for viewing live TV is Dscaler. It is a GPLed
tv viewer app that does deinterlacing and a lot of other nifty things. Last
time I checked, Dscaler worked only under windows :(
3. For recording, I find Cyberlink PowerVCR quite a good app. It could do
real time MPEG 2 compression & playback on my older Athlon 1GHz system quite
easily at the best sensible quality settings. The program can support better
quality for recording than what my TV tuner card can generate. PowerVCR is a
commercial app that runs on windows. The app has not been upgraded for over
a year now, so there can be better ones available. My new celeron 1.7ghz cpu
can't seem to take the load of powervcr! PowerVCR has a mode to directly
capture to VCD/SVCD spec MPEG streams, so with a fast computer, you don't
need to recompress the video to create VCDs.
4. Under windows 2000/XP, you will need to junk the software that comes with
most tv tuner cards, and use third party software and drivers. For drivers
under windows 2000/XP check out www.iulab.com and btwincap.sourceforge.net
both sites have different drivers. btwincap is oss, but the last time i
checked it out, it didn't support dscaler, and the system wud hang when
dscaler was run. For viewing don't look at anything but dscaler.
5. Most software for TV tuners don't recognize the indian cable tv
frequencies. Use UK cable frequency table in your software.
6. For TV, forget using a antenna. And even for cable TV, the tuner cards
require a higher signal than most TVs. My cable walla was quite unhappy with
the kind of signal my tv tuner card requires for decent pics.
7. My limited experience with a Celeron 1.7GHz and a Athlon 1GHz CPU tells
me that the Athlon 1GHz was much better for realtime video compression.
8. If you wan't to do regular VHS->VCD conversions, then skip the TV tuner
card, and get a card with a hardware compressor. You can get cards that are
designed specially for this usage.
Ambar
PS: I haven't checked out anything under linux for some time, if there is
any good sw under linux, some1 pls tell me.
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