On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 10:15:16PM -0800, Ben Barrett wrote:
> For Hauppauge and other BT8x8 (BrookTree, which is now Conexant?) chipset
> cards, which are well-supported, actual features vary.  I think the 848
> chipsets are full video in and out with tv tuner; the 878 work with a
> secondary sound chip, which often has an FM audio tuner.  It works well,
> although it can be a little noisy when switching channels... but that might
> just be the software.
> (I'm not sure about the 848/849 and 878/879 differences off-hand, either)

Actually the tuner is a seperate component, but whatever.  =)  The 879s do
have extra support for FM tuners if your tuner provides the feature.
Basically the bttv chipsets handle sound and NTSC/PAL video signals.  What
is supported and how varies by implementation and the exact chipset used.
Example, I've never seen an 848 card which supported seperate chroma/luma
inputs (S-Video), so I am not sure that the bt848 does have seperate
inputs.  Of course, you could still composite the two signals with a few
cents worth of isolating components, but it's not true S-Video in that
case.  Any card with an S-Video port has had a later chipset which I know
has seperate chroma and luma pins.


> I'd read that Hauppauge's PVR cards, which do mpeg-2 encoding in hardware,
> had some limitation, possibly that they *only* output the mpeg2 stream, as
> opposed to writing the video itself through the pci bus.  I want to find out
> more about this one; the PVR-250 cards are getting a good bit cheaper now.

I think they can support framebuffer output, but the drivers for anything
else are kinda weak.  Don't trust me on that though.


> Bob, I think your needs might have been well-covered already, but if I may
> digress and over-extend the thread:  An old school-buddy had told me how he
> got satellite tv on linux going; it was well-enough developed set of tools,
> using some older hardware.  I'm not sure what cards handle that, but there's
> even an HDTV tuner pci card out there, which is possibly the cheapest way to
> get HDTV.  

If the HDTV card is a bttv-class chipset, color me interested.  We even
have MacOS X support for those things (though it's a bit beta-quality at
the moment..)

_______________________________________________
EuG-LUG mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug

Reply via email to