Recommended Video Capture Card

["Marcus O.C. Metzler" <mocm@example.com>]

Venkatesh Raghavan writes:
 > Hi all,
 > 
 > Would like to use a video capture device on
 > Linux. Would be happy to receive any
 > recommendations for compatible hardware.
 > 
 > Have looked up the supported hardware list,
 > but would like to learn more for your experience.
 > Also looking for some feedback about some relatively
 > newer card such as Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-PCI.
 > 

All cards using the bt848/bt878 are very well supported. It is
possible to capture video with these and using a software encoder to
compress the video. The wintv-pvr has an additional chip that enables
it to encode mpeg1/2 by hardware. Its called kfir. There are already
drivers for another card using the kfir chip (at www.linuxtv.org). The
mpeg encoding works very well, although some people still have
problems with initializing the card (see mailing list mpeg2 at
www.linuxtv.org).
We are currently working on drivers for the wintv-pvr which uses 2
chips that are already supported under linux (kfir and bt878) and we
will hopefully get some information from conexant (they build the
bt878 (well now cn878) chips) to speed up the process. There are is
also a sourceforge project that wants to write drivers for the
wintv-pvr.
AFAIK you can already use the wintv-pvr in its capacity as grabber
card, but hardware mpeg1/2 encoding will take a while.

The encoding quality and parameters that can be set for the kfir chip
cover a wide range. So that you can do streaming video or high quality
DVD-like encoding. You can create transport, program or system streams
with  almost any bitrate you like.

More information can be found at linuxtv.org.

Hope that helps

Marcus

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