TV Tuner cards

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 11:48:15AM -0400, Taavi Burns wrote:
> Well...not entirely.  I have an old ATI tuner-only card (bt878-based)
> which works well enough for viewing, but it chews far too much CPU
> just doing the capture to allow me to encode it to any reasonable size
> in realtime on my Duron 1GHz.  To effectively record stuff, I end up
> having to dump it to disk (~10GiB/25 mins) while not running any other
> applications, and then encode it offline.
> 
> If the OP wants the ATI card, I probably wouldn't be sorry to see it
> go (private e-mail if that's the case).  The visual quality really
> isn't that good.  If I ever do get around to transferring my old VHS
> tapes to DVD, I'll just go and buy a hardware encoder.

Well I remember the original ATI tv tuner that connected using a special
connector to the Rage II cards and used an isa slot only for power, well
those could do viewing with no work by the cpu (the video overlay in the
video chip did it all) and work with gatos drivers.  Doing capture on
those certainly did take a lot more cpu, but very few cards like that
seem to have ever been made since they depended on specific video chips
to work.

The tuner did pick up a lot of noise on that one too, so it wasn't a
great design.

Lennart Sorensen
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