tv tuner? haupagage

Antimatter · Guru Joined: 11 Aug 2003 Posts: 463

i'm wondering if this is a good tv tuner for linux? the default haupagage 250 is little too expensive so i dig around a bit and found this

chunderbunny · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 12:22 am Post subject:

As far as I know while the 250 and 350 have excellent Linux support (in the form of the ivtv driver) the 150 and 500 aren't so good. The driver is still a little experimental and prone to crashing occasionally. Still, it is still under active development so it may improve in the near future.

Antimatter · Guru Joined: 11 Aug 2003 Posts: 463

damnit, is there any other cheaper alternative such as leadtek or so forth? i would really like to find a tv tuner that would work under linux for about 20-80 dollars.

or is the haupagage my best bet? 130$ is bit too steep for me so but as last resort i might get it but still... if i can find a cheaper alternative that works. that would be great.

noergeli · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 10:42 am Post subject:

If you don't need the hardware mpeg-encoder, i wouldn't recommend the hauppauge pvr 250/350 cards. I have the pvr350 for doing recordings on a P3 900MHz CPU, so i need one and it's running fine. If you just want to watch tv with some recent hardware in your system or you don't mind about a higher CPU-load when doing recordings you won't need it.
One problem with those cards is that none of the simple tv-programs know to handle them, because of the mpeg-stream. So you have to use mythtv or freevo for them.
If you think you don't need hardware-encoding, you should go with a cheaper card.

Antimatter · Guru Joined: 11 Aug 2003 Posts: 463

okay my hardware is 2.8 ghz pentium 4 w/ 2 gig of ram so that's plenty of power there so an cheaper card will do just fine, what's some good recommendation, i'm consdering the leadtek card for $33

Headrush · Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2004 6:24 pm Post subject:

I picked up a FlyVideo 3000 ($30) which is based on the SAA7134 chip.
Works perfectly for me with the standard kernel and no hacking required.

Using tvtime, the tuner is much much more stable than the software that came with it for Windows. (Never locks up and rock solid)
The only thing is to make sure you set the tuner option for module loading for you board.