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Re: [LUG] TV tuners

 

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 09:53 +0100, Simon Waters wrote:
> Anyone using a DVB-T (think freeview) tuner with GNU/Linux care to tell
> me what hardware/software (including host PC CPU and spec).
> 
> I'm thinking about doing the "mythical convergence platform" for myself
> (too many things under the television, and none of them let us surf or
> check email, inspite of 4 remote controls -- one of them might be the
> stereos - who knows).
> 

I'm doing the DVB-T thing very happily with 2 Terratec Cinergy 1400
cards under FC4 (which I'm *sure* you won't want to use :) ) and MythTV.

I did a fair bit of investigation into the choice of card to get ones
that were well supported, but they're not that easy / cheap to get in
the UK.  In the end I got mine from Germany on eBay.

The remote control IR interface on them is supported but you need a
pretty recent kernel >2.6.16.14 I think.  I've not tried it since last
upgrading my kernel.  Really helpfully remote controls use a different
IR standard than normal IRDA!

The box is a P-III 1GHz, 512MB and not enough disk space.  As a guide a
recording of Dr. Who (45 Mins) took up ~1.7GB of space.

Watching a recording and recording at the same time works fine but I've
not tried recording and watching live TV at the same time yet (the
reason for getting 2 cards!).

I remember reading somewhere you should reckon on ~700MHz for each tuner
card.

The biggest problem I encountered though was getting TV-out going under
Linux, as support seems to be limited at best.  I ended up getting a
VGA->TV-out hardware box to do it for me.

Alex.


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