Thanks for the info Nick. I only need to watch TV on the machine in question so an analogue card will do for the meantime until DVB-T appears next year. As you mention, with a bit of luck playback will be sorted by then.
It appears the 2.6 kernel supports quite a few TV cards so as long as I keep an eye what chipset a card is using I should be right. As it turns out I already have tvtime installed. Cheers, Chris Nick Rout wrote: >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.
