[mythtv-users] Cheapest card for capturing with MythTV?

[Ray Olszewski]

At 07:24 AM 3/5/2004 -0800, Steve Dorsey wrote:
>I think I have a card that will play back video, now I need one to capture.
>
>What's the cheapest card I can find for capturing? I guess it would have 
>to capture audio AND video, right?

The way you ask the question, it really has no specific answer. The 
"cheapest" card will vary from week to week and from place to place. 
Consult your local listings, as they say.

MythTV will work with any card that uses either the standard v4l drivers 
(bttv) or the ivtv drivers ... though remember that ivtv is still a bit 
buggy, as illustrated by periodic dismissals on this list of trouble 
reports with the reply that that question belongs on the ivtv list.

Reasonable people will disagree about which approach is better. Generally 
speaking, bttv-based cards are cheaper than ivtv-based ones (like the 
PVR-250 that others are praising) ... but they require beefier CPUs to 
handle encoding and decoding in software.

  People don't talk much these days about which non-ivtv capture cards work 
with Myth (or with v4l) and which don't, but if you search the list back a 
ways, you'll find it an active topic of discussion.

In any case, whatever card you get does need to process both audio and 
video, if you are starting with an RF signal ... though in practice, bttv 
cards will usually handoff audio to your sound card for encoding, and I've 
worked around a bad audio-input port on a Hauppauge card by feeding the 
audio (from a VCR) directly to the sound card.