[mythtv-users] Recommendations Please, TV Card

[R. G. Newbury]

Ross Campbell wrote:
> On 7/5/06, HILLSGROVE,MICHAEL <mikeah at cablespeed.com> wrote:
>> What is the easiest to get working and most compatible TV
>> card for a Linux machine?  I live in the United States. I
>> don't need to fight it, something that works is fine. It
>> doesn't have to be HD, but I do want to use the PVR
>> function.
> 
> Probably a PVR-250, since they're well supported for a very long time,
> but a PVR-150 or 500 works as well.
> 
> Look here: http://www.ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Supported_hardware
> 
>> My machine is a homebuilt AMD64x2, 2 gig RAM, unlimited
>> storage (I have an NAS device), ASUS mainboard, and a
>> NVIDIA 6600 PCI-E card with 256 RAM.  I would prefer to
>> put it on Linspire, but I do have UBUNTU, XANDROS hard
>> drives available.  If need be, I'll add another distro
>> HDD.  (All HDD's are in a rack, I swap them out as
>> required).
> 
> If you want to take the easy road to getting mythtv working, I would
> recommend you focus more on which Linux distribution you use than your
> video capture card.   Google for "$DISTRO mythtv" for your choices
> before you start out.
> 
> The road more often traveled is likely to be the easiest.


I would suggest a PVR500. It gives you 2 tuners in one slot. Once you 
get used to being able to record lots of stuff, you will find that there 
will be conflicts where you want 2 things which are running at the same 
time.

Regarding the distro, from what I read here, Fedora appears to be the 
easiest to get everything running, because of 3 main factors: Fedora is 
a well thought out distro and relatively easy to install, Jarod Wilson's 
guide is a great handholding cook-book, and the ATRPM's repository makes 
it easy to find and install the required dependencies.

Gentoo and some others may be "better" distros in some respects, but 
obtaining/installing myth's dependencies seems to be quite difficult.
The mini-distros are also subject to that to a certain extent. If you 
are a linux guru, you may not *need* the system-config gui's which come 
with Fedora... but I certainly do!

Geoff