Please recommend a tv tuner that's fully functional in Linux

[JeSpre]

I currently have an Asus tv880 and a Hauppauge wintv-pvr-150 and I'm not totally satisfied with either. I use svideo with audio from line-in exclusively, and tvtime is my viewer of choice.

The tv880 gives great picture quality, but I can't get any audio from this card. It's not an officially supported/listed card by the cx88 module, but video works great with certain "card=" arguments. I've tried more than my share of patches and configurations and versions. Even plugging the speakers into the line-out on the card outputs nothing. Do other cx88 cards handle the line-in audio ok?

The pvr150 is functionally perfect in linux, but has other flaws that make it unusable for me. First is the lag from the mpeg2 encoder, but also the video quality just isn't acceptable. I primarily watch sports with these cards, and this card has major problems with high-motion video. It comes off as a vertical tearing. I think this is an artifact of being encoded with mpeg2, but deinterlacing is the only thing that even comes close to cleaning up the image.

So what I'd like is something as good as or better than the tv880 as far as image quality, but with fully functional sound. I'm assuming that all cards featuring hardware encoding are out because of the lag. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

 

[timswim78]

http://www.pchdtv.com/

 

[drag]

Here is a list of some cards..
http://tvtime.sourceforge.net/cards.html

bttv-using cards are usually quite common and inexpensive, although they are getting pretty old nowadays. I have one, was happy with the image quality and didn't have noticable lag. (I hooked the game cube up to it to play games) They don't do hardware encoding. I had a ATI 'wonder ve'. Note that this is NOT the all-in-wonder cards that you get with ATI video cards, this was tv capture only. The all-in-wonder cards are unsupported. I had to plug the audio out from my capture card to audio capture on my sound card. The slightly upscale version didn't have to do this.

http://linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Bttv_devices_%28bt848%2C_bt878%29

 

[JeSpre]

I thought I'd update this thread with my choice in case someone finds themselves in a similar position. I ended up going with the Lifeview LifeTV Platinum LP. It uses the saa7133 module. This card has similar (excellent) picture quality as my old TV880 (cx88 card). The saa7133 driver is actually much more advanced than the cx88 in my experience, especially the audio portion. I get audio in tvtime via internal pass-thru to my sound card (TBSC). I also can capture audio without the pass-thru using the saa7133-alsa module. Capturing audio and video works perfecly using transcode. Overall, this card is exactly what I was looking for.

 

[drag]

Very good. Thanks.

Maybe I'll get one too. 🙂

 

[xtknight]

How do you get USB tuners working? Is it near impossible (probably even more so under 64-bit)? 🙁 I'm almost certain some older version of Fedora Core (2) 32-bit auto-detected my TV tuner just fine ("ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0"), and it worked. I see it in the hardware lists on Ubuntu 6 64-bit but I can't load any drivers onto it.

 

[drag]

What should happen is that you plug your system in, udev and all that notices the hotplug event and loads the module for the hardware automaticly and setup the device name.

There realy shouldn't be a difference between 32bit vs 64bit unless your using closed source drivers.

Does 'dmesg' command register the event when you plug it in?

Then try manually modprobing the device's driver module and check out dmesg to see what happens. (what module or what chipset that thing uses I have no idea.)

 

[xtknight]

That's the problem. I have no clue what driver had been used. bttv doesn't seem to work and if I can get it merely modprobed I don't know how to config it. I've googled on this for ages. I was just wondering if anyone knew of USB being a barrier in any way.