[mythtv-users] TV-card only (with good quality)?

[Jarod C. Wilson]

On Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003, at 11:43 US/Pacific, Emmanuel Allaud wrote:

>> The AVerTV Studio card sucks, the new Pinnacle PCTV Rave (not sure 
>> about other Pinnacle cards) have a new, unsupported tuner, the new 
>> WinTV-Go (as well as offerings from MSI and Asus, along with ATI's 
>> new TV Wonder Pro) use the cx88 chipset instead of the bt8x8, and 
>> don't work particularly well under Linux yet. From what I gather, the 
>> best bt8x8-based cards are the ATI TV Wonder (not the VE or the Pro) 
>> and the Leadtek Winfast TV Deluxe XP (or something like that).
>
> Thank you very much for your reply. I will investigate the Leadtek 
> card further (I already thought of it).
> BTW is that easy to have 2 such cards (one for live TV and one for 
> recording)?

Easy, not exactly. Doable, yes.

It is easier if you have two of the same card, or at least two cards 
with the same tuner type, because the tuner module doesn't really like 
multiple types of tuners (there are hacks around this, but that 
detracts from the ease factor).

Another factor with bt8x8 cards, is that unless they support btaudio 
(which very few do, I'm not certain about  the Leaktek), you'll need 
multiple sound cards to get audio from the capture card to the computer 
in a form MythTV can use. This is one of the very nice things about the 
PVR-x50; audio is muxed into the mpeg2 capture, so no audio jumper ever 
needed. So either make sure you get a card that supports btaudio, or be 
prepared to need two sound cards (you could use an add-on and 
on-board). In either case, the setup is less than trivial (especially 
compared to the PVR-x50).

--Jarod

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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