Affordable video capturing card

[Colin McGregor]

On 10/28/09, William Muriithi <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi pals,
>
> I am looking to buy a video card that should primary be optimized for
> video capturing, and not to worried at the moment how it does on
> display.  Ideally, should  support OSS as I would rather buy from
> vendors who are open source friendly.
>
> The card should have a S-video input as most of the data  that will be
> going to it is analogue. I have an extra PCI slot so, would be more
> interested on internal cards instead of USB based cards. I have done a
> bit of googling and I do not seem to be getting any good article, may
> be my key words are not that good as I think this should be well
> documented at this time.
>
> Would you mind sharing your experience if you have done something
> similar in the past?  Any information is appreciated, even caveat to
> look out for when going through the process.
>
> Regards,
>
> William

My experience in video capture comes out of working with MythTV. When
it comes to open source friendly analog capture the gold standard is
the Hauppauge PVR series of PCI capture cards (the PVR-150, PVR-250,
PVR-350 and PVR-500). Each of the PVR card models has a slightly
different feature set, and there is some variation within each model
(some shipped with remote controls, etc...). I would recommend any of
above for analog capture. I have a PVR-150 and have been very happy
with it for capture off cable TV.

Now the bad news, in the lead-up to analog TV shutdown the Federal
Communications Commission  in the US banned the sale of analog only
capture cards. This in turn meant that Hauppauge stopped production of
the PVR series. Basicly the only place you will find PVR cards for
sale is on the used market.

There are some cards currently on the market, such as the Hauppauge
HVR series that can do HDTV and analog capture. Problem here is that
the open source HDTV side of these drivers get all the attention, and
the analog side of these cards ... well that tends to be problematic.

Hope this helps.

Colin McGregor
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