If it's a older one it may be covered by the Gato project, if your lucky. Mostly older ones, and i figured most everybody had newer cards and didn't want to confuse them.
Stuff like the original Radeon, or ATI 128, stuff like that.
see cards. Not the most ideal setup. however Gatos driven chips, even though they generally work with Linux, don't work with Mythtv because of some functionality issues.
here are the drivers for various cards.
Bttv (for the bt848 and bt878 chipsets) cards were generally the most popular, and probably still are. They are used by a wide veriaty of different companies and cards, but are slowly being fazed out in favor of newer chipsets. These are non-hardware encoding tuner cards. In order to encode off of them you have to do with your cpu into mpjeg or mpeg4 formats. The codec used for them is from the libavcodec, which supports a few different formats.
the ideal one is mpeg4, which is pretty much the same that Windows guys use called 'Divx'. And there is a free version of Divx called Xvid. However libavcodec's mpeg4 is better then either Divx or Xvid (better quality, smaller files, and is faster all at the same time.)
My ATI Wonder VE is a bttv card for instance, i bought it a long time ago, though. There are dozens of different brands of these things laying around.
If you have a card that is based on the Connexant 2388x series chips you use the cx88 driver. These are replacing the bttv-based cards as time goes by. Probably superior, however they still don't have hardware encoders and need to use CPU time to encode the format into something that can be used for PVR stuff.
The premier card to use uses the IVTV drivers, which are still pretty much in beta awating a total rewrite. These cards are the WinPVR-250/WinPVR-350 from Hauppage. I have a WinPVR-250...
these are the sort of things that you find in Windows Media OSes. They are tuner + a mpeg2 hardware encoder. The finished product takes up much more space then the mpeg4/mjpeg on your hardware but is superior picture quality. Digital TV (don't confuse with High-definition, DVD's and DVB (European digital broadcasting standards) are all mostly mpeg2 formats. It's pretty much the standard for broadcasting.
The thing that sucks though is that cable/sattelite providers use propriatory encryption scemes to force people to pay extra for the set top boxes. So what ends up happenning is that you go from mpeg2 to your settop box to regular analog cable to your card, then back to mpeg2. Otherwise you'd be pretty much able to dump the signals straight to your harddrive. Oh, well. That sort of BS is one of the reasons for the HDTV standardization.
Pretty soon you'll be able to buy TVs that include a PCMCIA-type card slot that you can insert what is called a "cable card" which is freely aviable from your cable company with a subscription. This will provide the decoding encryption nessicary for your TV's tuner "card" to properly proccess the data. Of course cable companies will barely mention this and continue to pimp their cable tv-top boxes for that extra 5 or 10 bucks of blood money they can get out of you per month.
I am hoping that people will start making HDTV computer tuners that have the ability to accept 'cable cards'. But I am not aware of anything like that yet.
right now the best HDTV solution for linux is aviable at
http://www.pchdtv.com/ and is the HD-3000 card. It was specificly designed for Linux and is fairly cheap when compared to other HD cards. Probably won't work for windows, though. Mythtv will support this card in the near future, too. However due to the protection put on cable company's HDTV broadcasts this card (and others) are only able to pick up on radio (traditional TV) HDTV broadcasts. In my city there are only a couple stations that broadcast in HDTV format, so it's not realy worth it for me. I am hoping for that cable card, I'll never pay for a tv-set-top box, it's a insult for me to pay extra for something like that. It's like having to lease a telephone from AT&T in order to make long distance phone calls.
There are a few other options, too. like if you have a C or Ku-band satalite receiver. (think dishes on top of sports bars and in redneck backyards. These guys pick up the analog signals from space that the cable companies get and then charge you for. But you can get most of them for free. And special signals, too. Like during a superbowl they will setup a temp channel just for the raw feed to local stations and you can pick up on those, too. Stuff like HBO is scrambled, but you can buy/rent descramblers for them and subscribe to individual channels. Much cheaper then cable. For instance if you subscribe to the history channel it would cost around $0.28 per month, IIRC. Better quality then mini-"digital" subcriber dishes, too. Those are encoded in mpeg2 form, and C-band/Ku-band is the analog signal that exists BEFORE they encode it into mpeg2 form. I would get this if I owned my own house/Yard. Equipment costs a few thousand bucks unless you get it used for dirt cheap. You can find cards to plug it into your computer that Linux supports.)
The cheapest is going and finding a bttv-type card and use it on a computer with above 1.5ghz cpu. You can pick one up for around 20 bucks.
However this is mostly a FYI. If your not familar with Linux it will take a long time before you'll probably get it all working. Nice project though for a hobby type thing, as long as your not expecting immediate results. They also have bootable
live-linux cdroms (OS runs directly from CDROm without having to install anything on the harddrive) that can act as a Mythtv frontend built in that you can use if WinMyth doesn't work out and you don't want to install Linux on your laptop.
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