[wplug] MythTV

[Patrick Wagstrom]

> TV Tuner Card (Hauppauge Win TV PVR-250 work best, hardware MPEG

I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I forgot to make a few
comments related to TV tuners.

Generally NTSC (analog tv) tuners come in two flavors, standard and
mpeg2 encoder.  Generally getting an mpeg2 encoder pays for itself over
the course of year in the electricity it saves by not requiring your
processor to encode the video for you.  Also, the lower system load
makes it easier to do multiple things.

Standard flavors are typically the brooktree chipset and are pretty
cheap (~30).  MPEG2 cost a bit more.

Recently, Hauppauge (makers of the most-well-supported mpeg2 encoders)
has released a few new cards.  I'll mention them here.

WinTV PVR-350 - Oldest and most expensive.  Includes an FM receiver and
TV out with hardware MPEG decoding in addition to standard encoding.
Well supported by IVTV driver.  TV out is somewhat usable, but you're
probably better off with NVidia or matrox.

WinTV PVR-250 - Just like the 350 but with no TV out or FM tuner.
Sometime recently they silently upgraded the chipset, this means that
it's a bit more work to get it to work on Linux right now.  It is
getting better at a pretty good clip.  If you're not up for a challenge,
get a used version and that should work out of the box.

WinTV PVR-500 - The bad boy card.  Dual tuners and encoders to get two
channels at once.  About the same price as a PVR 250.  However, driver
support is prelim, so expect some issues.  Right now you need to record
in full resolution, but expect that to change soon.

WinTV PVR-150 - The low end version of the cards.  Essentially a cheaper
PVR-150.  See the same caveat about driver support as the 500.

Some of these cards are labeled as "MCE" for Media Center Edition.  This
means they don't come with a remote.  Which is usually fine.  The
remotes are well supported under Linux but only listen to commands sent
by the manufacturer remote.  Most programmable remotes can learn them.
Regardless, it probably is easier to buy an IR keyboard and a universal
remote to mimic keyboard commands.

As of today, my recommendation is still at PVR-250, however if I were
buying in a month or two, I'd consider the 150 (cheap! ~ $80) or the
500.

Hope this helps,

--Patrick