Linux TV

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 12:09:42PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> 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>

It does not, and apparently the chip maker is hostile towards open source
from what I found in the quick search I did.

> 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>

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
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