[TriLUG] Best HD/TV or Regular TV card for linux

[Joseph Tate]

On 3/27/06, John Turner <jdturner at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> You might check out www.digitalconnection.com
> I am using 2 DVICO FusionHDTV3 with the DVB driver in a Myth box.
> I think the latest version is the FusionHDTV5.
>
> John
>

I just bought a HD5000 air2pc HDTV Capture card
(http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=46), and thought I
would share my experiences with it:
Unless you have a very recent video card and a very fast CPU, video
playback sucks, whether live or recorded.

Before you jump on a HDTV capture card, play the clip at
http://pchdtv.com/downloads/tst.tar in mplayer or xine on your target
system.  (Note that it's an mpeg stream, not a tar file as the url
implies).

I thought my Athlon XP 3000+ with 512MB ram and rinky-dink video card
(ATI 7500 and Nvidia GeForce 2) would be fine, but it chews all my CPU
and chops like crazy.  I just bought a new GeForce 6200A with HDTV out
and it seems to be able to play that clip ok, but I haven't had a lot
of time to really play.  My cpu usage still seems to be very very high
though.  The nuts and bolts of it is: you need a really good mpeg
decoder to do decode hdtv signals in realtime.


As for the broadcast flag, I don't think any hardware got made that
supports it.  If it did, the mfg jumped the gun.

--
Joseph Tate
Personal e-mail: jtate AT dragonstrider DOT com
Web: http://www.dragonstrider.com