John Marrett <[email protected]> writes:

>> hauppauge wintv model 401 w fm radio
>> http://www.hauppauge.com
>> http://bytesex.org/bttv/ also xawtv etc
>
> I use a Hauppauge PVR 250. The card is more expensive (100USD off
> ebay) than a bttv card but features hardware mpeg encoding. I can
> capture on a PII 233 with 5 to 10 percent cpu load.

Someone else who I believe is on this list, Dean Jackson, has a
similar beast and raved about it as well.

I think he's doing using DVB drivers [2] with it.  I've seen that they
have made their way into the standard 2.6 tree.

> A linux driver is available [1] and works reasonably well, though it
> is still in beta and a friend has experienced some image quality
> problems.
>
>[1] http://ivtv.sourceforge.net

[2] http://www.linuxtv.org/

I don't mind the cpu cost of the software encoding (I'm using xawtv's
streamer) as I normally, although fairly infrequently, encode shows
that I'll miss because I am away using atd so I won't be affected
personally by any cpu load ;-)

With software encoding I have the added benefit of being able to
choose my codec, resolution, frame rate, etc to try to decide what
quality I am willing to go to balanced against disk usage.  One can
obviously convert afterwards regardless of software or hardware
encoding.

Conversion of video codecs can get frustrating as I'm not conversed
yet in all their nuances and mjpegtools contains numerous utilities
with tons of manpages and options.  There are some simpler wrapper
scripts for converting to mpeg2 at the right bitrate to rip vcd's for
instance.

One day I'll take the time to capture all my old camcorder recordings
and get more serious about this.

--
Ted Guild <[email protected]>
http://guilds.net