Linux TV

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Colin McGregor <colin.mc151-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Russell Reiter <rreiter91-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

| > Just installed Fedora 16 for a friend and they want to try a digital tv tuner.

As Colin points out, digital TV tuners are ONLY useful in Canada with
an antena.  Digital signals from cable companies in Canada are all
encrypted in a way that forces you to use a cable-company settop box.
Bell signals are actually worse in theory (only one channel's signal
gets to you), but that isn't any worse in practice.

If you are forced to use a STB, you can only capture the analogue
output.  And your card doesn't get to tune -- the STB does.  For
capturing you can use one of a bunch of cards.  Common wisdom is that
you want ones that do hardware MPEG encoding to cut down the load on
the computer; this may not matter now because CPUs have gotten more
powerful in the last 10 years.

Hauppauge even makes a box that can capture component video, an
analogue HD output available from some STBs.
  <http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html> Sometimes
NCIX or Dell has these on sale at a noticeable discount.  There is
also a PCIe version of this called the Colossus.  I don't even know if
it works under Linux.
  <http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_colossus.html>

So: for more focussed advice, you should tell us where the TV signal
is coming from.  And where it might come from in the future, if that is 
likely to be different.

Note that there is a MythGTA mailing list.  It is described at the
bottom of <http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists>
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