[PLUG] TV tuner cards recommendation

Tim tim-pdxlug at sentinelchicken.org
Sat Jul 18 19:01:32 UTC 2009


> I am looking at these TV tuner cards to create an HTPC.
> Would you please be so kind to share your experience on how these cards work
> with Linux. Any pros and cons? Which one to choose? Any recommendations?
> 
> ASUS My Cinema EHD3-100 Dual Hybrid TV Card
> AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe MCE
> Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250
> DIAMOND ATI TV Wonder HD 650 Combo TVW650PCIEWB
> DViCO FusionHDTV7 Dual Express DUAL HDTV/Analog TV Tuner Card
> 
> 
> Thank you very much in advance for any hints or suggestions,


I haven't used any of the above cards, but I've been maintaining an
analog Mythbox for several years using the Hauppauge PVR-350.  I'm
right in the middle of the process of building a new machine from
scratch as an HVR.  The hardware is in the mail from Newegg.

However, I did already buy my tuner card to test it out before
investing in the expensive hardware.  I chose the Hauppauge HVR-950Q:
  http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr950q.html

Note that it uses a *completely* different chipset than the HVR-950,
but fortunately the drivers for this are coming along nicely.  I
actually spoke with the maintainer of the linux drivers on IRC and was
able to get some over-the-air channels to come in just fine using it
on my old hardware.

Note that USB tuners have got a bad rap quite a bit over the years, I
think mostly because they typically don't include a hardware encoder.
The 950Q doesn't, but with ATSC video coming in, your card doesn't
*need* to do any encoding.  It just relays the MPEG stream on to your
box.  This makes cards cheaper.  Yes, you'd have to do encoding if you
use the analog tuner in the card, but I don't imagine I'll be doing a
lot of that, and with a new quad-core proc, it can probably handle it.

Now, a little bit about my experiences with getting the 950Q
working...  The latest kernel sources available in Debian unstable are
2.6.30-2, and the 2.6.30 line includes an early version of the
driver I needed.  I initially built a kernel from 2.6.30-1, had to
fight with my nvidia proprietary drivers a bit because they don't keep
up with kernel changes that well, but finally got that kernel booting
and running.  The card worked fine after i figured out how to get
MythTV to use it, but the kernel was generally *very buggy*.  All
video, even from old tuner card, has all kinds of stutters and
whenever I put a DVD in my drive, I got a kernel panic.  Fun.  Later I
noticed the 2.6.30-2 sources included a fix in the ide-cd driver, so I
thought that issue might be fixed.  Unfortunately I couldn't get that
kernel to boot *at all*.  

After rolling back to my custom 2.6.26, the problems went away.  I'll
probably end up compiling the latest third-party drivers against
2.6.26 instead of trying the latest mainline kernel.

Anyway, that's one case study of a particular card under Linux.
HTH,
tim



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