Chris Downie wrote:
Any recommendations, first-hand experience or preferred brands. I'm leaning
towards a Leadtek WinFast DTV1000T which appears to be well supported (well
maybe not the remote).
Cheers,
Chris
Depends what you want to watch with it and how you want to watch. I am
assuming analogue terrestial TV - don't forget analogue will be cut off
in the foreseeable future - 2011 I think.
The Hauppauge PVR-150 has a hardware mpeg-2 encoder and is by far the
"preferred" card if you want to make a DVR* - mythtv supports it well.
The remote is supported too (there are two versions, the OEM with no
remote and another one with remote). Personally I got the one without
remote and bought a microsoft remote which is also supported out of the box.
If you just want to watch TV and not records it then tvtime is the best
app, but does not support the Hauppauge PVR cards.
If you want higher quality TV and have a Sky dish (or are prepared to
install a dish) then a DVB-S card will get you all the freeview channels
(TV1, TV2, TV3, C4, TVNZ6, Cue, Stratos, TVNZ Sports extra, Parliament,
Maori) in a clear digital signal. I thoroughly recommend the Skystar 2
card available from the NZ supplier for $145 on trademe. Get the one
with the USB remote which works like a IR keyboard (so you don't need to
muck about with lirc).
DVB-T in NZ is launching next year and will have some HD channels. Test
streams are available on and off now. The streams will be h.264 (a newer
codec than mpeg-2 that the satellites transmit). Playback is presently
tricky in linux due to codec difficulties, but i anticipate that if you
are running an up to date machine with the latest ffmpeg and mplayer (ie
SVN versions), it might work by airtime.
*Digital Video Recorder.
