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TV Tuner Cards For Unix? 42

Posted by Cliff from the tv-dinners-in-your-window-manager dept.
Marooned asks: "I've been wondering what a good TV tuner card would be, preferably with good Linux compatability (preferably working under 2.4). Yes, someone already asked about this but it was a while ago, but he got few replies. There are a lot more options now (ATI Radeon All-in-One, GeForce w/tvout, etc.), and since we're all richer and wiser now (than when the first article was posted, I wanted to know if anyone can recommend a good card to go along with my SBLive! and Cambridge DTT 3500. Any takers? (Advice on a DVD drive would be welcome too)" Most of the video features on these cards are supported, but I'm not quite sure as to the extent of Linux support available for the TV tuning features on today's cards.
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TV Tuner Cards For Unix? More

TV Tuner Cards For Unix?

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  • WinTV (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Hauppauge WinTV cards are well suported under linux. There are a lot of programs out there that work with BTTV devices (just do a search for BTTV on freshmeat).

  • Re:WinTV (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I too have had a WinTV card for two years and have had no problems. Works better than under Windows, because the Windows drivers are pretty ill-behaved. Such it is with most Win dirvers.

    I also have run 2.4 since test2, and had no problems. Just one tip, though: compile your kernel with "msp34xx sound chip" support: Hauppauge boards use it. It's under misc sound devices, or something like that. msp3400.o.
  • I'd shy away from a BTTV card if possible. I have one and it works great, and there's lots of software for it. However I had a chance to use some of the ATi capture cards with the GATOS project and I was quite impressed. Here are some of the differences I'm aware of:
    • Since the ATi cards are integrated with your graphics card, you don't use up PCI bandwidth displaying video to your monitor. This also makes for smoother display when you move the video window around, since (at least in overlay mode) the bttv card simply pipes its output to a section of the video card's framebuffer, and when you move its window it takes a moment to update the geometry. And by the time it does, it often leaves a little bit of video corruption until the Xserver decides to update that section again. The ATi cards had no problem moving the video around with its window.
    • The BTTV card can only show certain resolutions, whereas the ATi capture devices does hardware resizing, so you can quite easily display video much larger than the 640x480 capture CCD. It could display video blown up to serve as your desktop background.
    • The ATi devices also have other nifty hardware tricks, like zooming in on an area and performing image smoothing, etc., most of which was supported by GATOS.
    • The Rage 128 3D accelerator that comes with some All-in-Wonders works decently under XFree4. Hopefully the Radeon drivers will work soon.
    So right now there's much more Linux software specifically for the BTTV cards, so they're more useful at the moment, but, like the way the 3dfx Voodoo2 was supplanted by more sophisticated cards once the Linux support was there, I'd say the BTTV's days as "the best TV capture card for Linux" are numbered.
  • If you happen to grab the WinTV card with an FM tuner (this is the main reason I bought mine, actually and it works great), you'll have to load the bttv module with the argument "radio=1". I had to muck around with the xmradio source a little bit to get it to compile with recent versions of bttv (the author has been told about the changes that were needed), but it works flawlessly.

    You'll probably want to grab the latest Video4Linux drivers (0.7.52 or so), in addition to enabling i2c on your kernel.

  • I own 2 BTTV based cards, the 829 and the 848 (or 78?)... I haven't tried getting the 829 working in linux because it is in my headless router, but the other card works perfectly but mono sound. The one I have used gives a very sharp picture, but I've noticed artifacts on fast motion.

    Meanwhile, my ATI All In Wonder Pro with Gatos gives VERY good results.. The picture is comparatively blurred, but it does not have the for-mentioned artifacts. The all in wonder also does hardware scaling, the bttv cards are resolution limited.. most do 640x480, i think the higher end ones may do 800x600 these days. I run my All in Wonder Pro at 1280x1024 without a hitch. Note that the All in Wonder Pro in linux is NOT currently a good choice for video editting or capture, it uses the xatitv program or any XV aware apps.. I don't think you can use any v4l stuff with it.

    Have fun!
  • I know but I want to be able to both hook up cable directly to my pc (when i'm at the dorm) and hook up the PC to a tv (when i'm at home) to watch dvd's, so both would be useful.

    I'd prefer the tuner-only to the tv-out-only option though.
  • It's not the newest piece of hardware around, but it's been working 100% fine for me. The only drag is if you dual boot to Windows, it's hard to get the updated software drivers that can capture to MPEG format because of some legal sillyness preventing them from posting them on their website. You have to fill out a (short) form and have them mail you the CD. I've lost a few of them but they keep sending me fresh ones everytime I do... *shrug* ~Kevin :)
  • Alright, it's been a longggggg time since I setup the computer with the TV-Wonder installed to work under Linux and it's since become a full on toy Windows box but here's what I remember needing to do in order for it to work with 2.2.12 or some really old kernel version like that.

    Go to http://www.voxel.at/prj/i2c/ and get the nice and updated i2c drivers because the ones in the kernel (if any) are old and crusty and out of date.

    Go to http://roadrunner.swansea.uk.linux.org/v4l.shtml and get the nice and updated BTTV drivers because the ones in the kernel are old and crusty and out of date.

    Get xawtv http://www.strusel007.de/linux/xawtv/index.html because yeah... it works :)

    RTFMs and I think you'll end up with i2c.o bttv.o and tuner.o modules. modprobe them, fire up X, and xawtv & and you're gold.

    ~Kevin
    :)

  • Ah here I am like a tool replying to my own post for an edit.

    http://www.strusel007.de/linux/bttv/

    bttv drivers are there.

    ~Kevin
    :)

  • Check out FxTV and the hauppage card.
    I guess not all of us here runs linux.
  • I've got a Hauppauge Pixelview PV-BT878P+ which works fine for me. I had to find a newer version of the BT878 driver to make it work with the 2.17 kernel, it looks like 2.4 has everything the card needs. It took some fiddling with the driver's source to get the sound to work.

    Interfaces

    • Tuner in. Needs an amplified signal, e.g. cable TV or a VCR. A normal aerial doesn't work.
    • S-video in. I think this is used by modern camcorders. I don't use it.
    • Composite video in. This is what my VCR emits.
    • Audio out.

    Picture quality is fine for TV, the card can capture at up to 800x600. Supposedly the card works with every TV standard there is (PAL, NTSC, etc.) but I only have PAL so I don't know if the others actually work. The card puts the video directly in the graphics card's memory, so the CPU is hardly loaded at all if you're just watching TV (2% at worst).

    Problems

    • The motherboard interferes with picture and sound on some channels. Sound is generally no problem unless I'm "doing something". If I compile the kernel, it sounds like there's an arcade game in the background of whatever's on TV. Similarly, some channels get a bit "stripy". Fine for watching TV, annoying when you want to capture pictures.
    • I didn't get the remote control to work. I didn't try very hard, just the maze of drivers and webpages explaining what to do wasn't worth trying to navigate.
    • My CPU (166MHz Pentium) is too slow to capture films. (I get 10 frames/s at 320x240)
    • Capturing films takes a heap of disk space because the card has no hardware compression.
    • I can't change the sound volume. I don't know if the card can do that or not. Doesn't matter---I just loop the sound through my sound card and set the volume that way.


    Matt
  • ATI All-In-Wonder Pro [ati.com]

    This card is an oldie but goodie. Perhaps you could simply get this as a pci card and supplement your primary agp card/display (if you need 3d power for games, or have some badass big monitor). The tv support is excellent in linux through gatos. [binghamton.edu] The card is also has excellent 2d. I use it in my dorm room as my only tv and only display adapter (I do not play games).

    Good luck in your search.

  • My guess is that the tuner of the cheaper cards
    have inferior shielding. This is not true for all cheap cards, the WinTV GO! has good quality as well, but limited features.
  • I have a Radeon ... not allinwonder though.

    DRI works, and I get good 3D acceleration, so there's some hardware support done good for you. gatos has some support for Radeon, not sure how much, but I saw a bunch of commits going on in livid-cvs.

    If you want DRI, check out the CVS tree from dri.sourceforge.net, main branch. But last I checked it minces all forms of 3D acceleration quite badly, but it worked like a charm on January 15th. So check out the main branch on January 15th. For a quick HOWTO, look at README.DRIcomp.gz in /usr/share/doc/xserver-xfree86 on a Debian system, or search around on x.org; it's there somewhere. It's best to be running X 4.0.[12] already to be able to link in the rest of the infrastructure easily. I've found that if you set ProjectRoot to /usr/<somewhere besides X11R6> and run /usr/there/bin/X -configure, modify /root/XF86Config.new as appropriate, and put it in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (or whereever it normally goes on your distro), you can use your normal (X 4.0.2) server and it'll just load the Radeon modules. Works fine for me, YMMV. Also make sure your Mesa (libGL) libs are the ones DRI built. Then startx (kdm doesn't like me now), run glxinfo, and have fun if it says "Direct Rendering: Yes". Email me privately (obvious modifications to email of course) if you have a Radeon and want Quake &c and can't figure it out from the above and other docs.

    Now this of course doesn't relate to video capture, but shows that high-level Radeon support has already been done in one area, and from what I know about video cards (not much, mind you...), capturing features should be a lot simpler than good 3D acceleration. So grab gatos from LiViD [linuxvideo.org] and have fun.

  • Another way to integrate PVR and Linux is to use a RedRat Remote to drive an external PVR. I do this with my ReplayTV and am very happy with the result, see Xr3 on my web site. http://www.slip.net/~gmd/index.html I use a modified version of Gatos(ATI AIWpro) and wrote a floating remote GUI for it, see the atitvRemote link.
  • I use a sightly modified version of GATOS with my All-in-wonder pro card. I added the ability to control the program from the shell or another program(GUI remote). Subsequently I added a ReplayTV, DVD and VCR combo to the mix, feeding the input through the video input port. To control all of this I got a RedRat2 serial port based IR remote control. Then I threw together some code to drive it all, here is a photo: http://www.slip.net/~gmd/RedRat/i2k.jpg Details/code at my web site: http://www.slip.net/~gmd Sometimes it's better to use peripherals.
  • How much you want for them? Anyone else got these for sale at a good price?

    I modified GATOS a bit to allow it to be controlled from the shell or a remote GUI panel. See:

    My Web Site [slip.net] for details.

  • Here are the links again:

    My Web Site [slip.net] contains GATOS software mods for the ATI All-In-Wonder pro, as well as the code for the RedRat2(ReplayTV/DVD/VCR) GUI remotes.

    Art'sy ScreenShot [slip.net] called "Millenium Wall" showing all of the above in action!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If you're talking about Digital (DVB, DTV) TV, check out www.linuxtv.org [linuxtv.org] .

    No need for Tivo or ReplayTV.

    -Hans

  • The Rage Theatre chipset is supported just not through GAOTS. It is supported with the XVideo extension in X4.0. The cards do an amazing job and the best part is that video plays back better in Linux than in Windows IMHO. Make sure to compile SDL with ATI support and then your golden.
  • Generally any card with a BrookTree BT8x8 (BT 848 or BT878) chip should work fine.
    There are varying levels of support for the onboard audio outputs and mixers, so YMMV in that respect.
    I use an old IX Micro IXTV (BT848), and it works *beautifully* (except for onboard audio), which isn't a problem 'cause I run an S-Video feed from my Digital satellite receiver, and a separate audio feed into the soundcard.
    Bear one thing in mid though, that the reception will *not* come close to that of a good TV, (at least in every TV card I've seen), but that's a tuner issue, not a picture quality issue.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Wonder why, because the tuner is similar to that in a TV? Could it just be that a PC is a fairly sh1tty environment RF wise and the tuner can not cope?
  • Well, my chipset on this card is not supported under gatos (Rage Enhanced Theater) so I'm jewed until I run into a program that *does* support this card. (http://www.linuxvideo.org/gatos/faq.html#General1 What cards are supported by the GATOS xatitv program? The GATOS xatitv program is intended to support ATI cards in the Rage, Rage Pro, and Rage 128 line. These cards use Brooktree/Conexant chipsets. xatitv does not support Rage 128 Pro based cards, which use ATI's Rage Theatre chipset. Please note that this means that the 16 MB version of the ATI All-in-Wonder 128 is supported in xatitv, but the ATI All-in-Wonder 128 32 MB card, which uses the Rage Theatre, is not supported in xatitv (see next question).
  • lalala I love you man. :)
  • I have an old Gallant tuner card based on the Philips FI1216Mk2 tuner (bt848 & TDA9800 sound), BTTV thinks its a hauppauge. I have never managed to get any sound from it regardless of application (although it works under windows). Any clues ?
  • Other people have suggested the BT848 chipset, which I use (via a WinTV GO! card). You didn't ask, but I have to imagine you'll want some good software to go with it.

    Broadcast 2000 (http://heroines.sourceforge.net) provides excellent video editing support. It can record from any Video4Linux device (including the BT cards) and output to Quicktime. Heroines also has a good MPEG-2 package that can re-encode the Quicktime movies to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. If you want even smaller files, RealProducer will read bcast's Quicktime files.

    One thing about bcast: You need the latest kernel and glibc 2.2. RedHat 7.0 and (I think) Debian support glibc 2.2. Bcst will work with older versions, but will crash when your file exceeds 2Gig.
  • Actually you can record at 640x480 with the hauppage cards, they only advertise 320x240 for some reason. I use virtuadub in windows to do it. Recording at 640x480, applying some filters, then mpeg4'ing it can result in some really high quality caps (if you have a clean source).

    I just wish I had the wintv-pvr so I didn't have to have my computer tied up compressing to mpeg.

  • This is some-what related...

    Is there any good software out there to enable the TV out support on my GeForce II? I can display n my TV if I startup my computer with no monitor plugged in (and it'll then default to TV out port) - but that only works in text and switching to X just doesn't happen.

    Any help would be appreciated - thanks

  • Thanks dude - you make my week. :)

  • If you've managed to get the PCI bt878 based ATI TV wonder working with linux, could you tell me how and what software you were using? I've tried everything to get this card detected by the kernel, with absolutely no luck. That would make my day, bigtime, because I have to leave my machine on in windows to tape shows during the day. :)

    Anyone else had success with this card? (ATI TV Wonder PCI)

  • The BT8x8 cards are not particularly suited to capturing video of any length, since they have no hardware compression, and reliable realtime software MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MJPEG compression is not viable, AFAIK under Linux (Maybe the Alpha's vector processor would make this possible?)

    No, this is incorrect. My ATI TV Wonder PCI (bt878) is more than capable of realtime mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 (less extensively tested than mpeg-1, since the native software only supports mpeg 1) encoding on a duron 600 oc'd to 900. It does so quite reliably, but I haven't been able to get the card running in linux.

    If youre looking for a card to capture video, look for something a little more pwerful with an onboard hardware compresion engine.

    My $80 Duron does a great job with mpeg 1 with cycles to spare right now, if you're just going after NTSC television capture.


  • Radeon's don't offer support for anything but windows, and if you do run one on windows the software is laughably bad.

    Yeah, this is off-topic, but it's valid to the discussion.

    I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Pro. (Rage Pro, as opposed to the Rage 128 Pro.)

    It's in my main machine, which, I'm sorry guys, runs Windows. I need Windows for work more than anything else.

    Under Windows 95B, the TV application would occasionally crash. It was one of my more unstable applications on an otherwise very stable Windows box.

    Under Windows 2000, the drivers and TV application are still in Beta. No information posted to their website since October 16th. Currently, the TV application sucks back 25% or so of my CPU and then causes a variety of crashes ranging from total lockups to spontaneous system reboots. I've never seen a GPF or other message out of this thing: it just stops.

    For one thing, it proves that Windows 2000 is about as uncrashable as the Titanic was unsinkable.

    Fine, it's in beta. I expect it to crash occasionally. But this behavior is coming from several beta releases into the process, and there's been no word from ATI about when they're going to resolve this.

    So, as if we didn't already know that Windows could be broken, as one who is stuck with either a $300 paperweight or a computer that crashes more frequently than a kernel development workstation, I will never buy another ATI product again.

    I bought 53 computers last month. Every last one of them was specified with a variety of non-ATI video cards.

    ATI's Toronto-area world headquarters are just 20 minutes down the street from my house. Does anyone want to join with me, call the press, and have a video card bonfire in their parking lot, to protest the apparently complete ineptitude of the programmers that they hire?


  • ATI All-In-Wonder Pro This card is an oldie but goodie. Perhaps you could simply get this as a pci card and supplement your primary agp card/display (if you need 3d power for games, or have some badass big monitor). The tv support is excellent in linux through gatos. The card is also has excellent 2d. I use it in my dorm room as my only tv and only display adapter (I do not play games).

    I have 2 of these. Perhaps someone would want to trade them for TV tuner cards where the Windows 2000 drivers and TV applications aren't in permanent beta?

    Both PCI Rage Pro, both with 8 megs RAM, both with great hardware but ATI's typically abysmal software.

    And, unfortunately, I need to run these in Windows.


  • You don't even know the half of it. I bought a Ati Rage Fury Maxx. Works wine in 98, but in 2k or Me, it sucks cycles all the time. Can even get it to work in linux. And from ati, no new drives and they said they would be out with 2k. What a joke!

    Microsoft includes drivers for my Rage Pro on the Windows 2000 CD. Unfortunately, they don't support the advanced features of the All-in-Wonder card, so I have to run the ATI drivers.

    This is about the only time any rational, intelligent person will ever utter these words, with not a hint of sarcasm: How I long for the stability of Microsoft software. But it's true.

    Coming to the protest?

    Bring your unsupported or crash-prone ATI video cards, fly to Toronto.

    Watch for a forest green 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck, with a large gas barbecue in the back, driving slowly through the arrivals level at the terminal.

    Hop in, we'll go to Markham, call the media, and cook a few video cards in ATI's parking lot, as a protest to their software quality.

  • BT848 works great for me (Score:3)

    by ikekrull ( 59661 ) on Saturday February 03, 2001 @03:34PM (#459600) Homepage
    My cheap-ass BT848 card has worked since the heady days of the 2.0 kernel, and never given any trouble. Its supported under 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.

    Mostly i use mine for capturing frames for claymation from various video cameras. XawTV provides realtime preview and image capture, and i use a couple of little shell scripts and command line tools to turn a folder full of individual frames into an MPG or AVI file.

    I also use XawTV to watch TV both on the root window and in smaller mini-windows.

    Only mono audio, but you can use an external tuner - i.e. VCR and just use the capture card as a composite/SVideo input.

    Be sure you have a main video card that supports external overlay (most modern PCI/AGP cards do, though there are some that are a pain in the ass)

    The BT8x8 cards are not particularly suited to capturing video of any length, since they have no hardware compression, and reliable realtime software MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MJPEG compression is not viable, AFAIK under Linux (Maybe the Alpha's vector processor would make this possible?)

    If youre looking for a card to capture video, look for something a little more pwerful with an onboard hardware compresion engine.

    I also have an Iomega Buz which is now supported under Linux - this will MJPEG compress your video in realtime, enabling you to capture full-frame, 25/30fps PAL/NTSC video at a rate of around 3-5MB/second. The Miro DC10+ is also supported i believe, and there are other cards which are supported by the manufacturers - Someone help me out here.

    Uncompressed capture will most likely use at least twice this much space, if your drives can handle that kind of sustained rate.

  • ATI All-In-Wonder Products (Score:3)

    by aidoneus ( 74503 ) on Saturday February 03, 2001 @07:38AM (#459601) Journal
    Personally, from my experience I'd reccomend an ATI All-In-Wonder product (I have an AIW PRo, the Radeon is a dream right now). When I first started using it over a year and a half ago, the drivers were buggy, but now I've found that Gatos has done a great job putting together solid and easy to use tuner support. Check ATI [ati.com] for the link, or The Linux Video Project [linuxvideo.org] for the newest drivers. ATI actually points to xfree pages.

    -Jason

  • Re:TV Tuner cards (Score:3)

    by Brama ( 80257 ) on Saturday February 03, 2001 @01:30PM (#459602) Homepage
    I recently bought a WinTV Theater tv card. The tuner on this card is very good, certainly comparable with TV quality reception. If you have a tv-out you probably wouldn't notice the difference with a 'real' tv picture. You can capture full-screen NTSC (640x480) or full-screen PAL (756x384) depending on your tuner. This particular card has stereo audio support, which it can transform into 5.1 surround sound audio.

    I used to have a FlyVideo2 Bt848 tv card, but its tuner quality was not good. Hard drives spinning would interfere with the signal, for example. I've seen a few other cards with this problem as well, all being low-budget ones. You should probably avoid those.

    Software support for this (and any other bt878/bt848 based) card is excellent. I prefer it over the (rather bad) windows software shipped with it. Stuff like auto-tuning, s-band, color/ contrast/brightness control is well supported. Xawtv is a very good program to use as a tv viewer. qtvidcap (video grabber for X), which comes with avifile is nice as well. VCR is a text-console capture program similar to qtvidcap (I wrote it using qtvidcap's capture code). You can find all these programs on freshmeat.

  • A Whole Lotta Replies (Score:4)

    by Peale ( 9155 ) on Saturday February 03, 2001 @05:10AM (#459603) Homepage Journal
    I don't see anything of value here, so I'll add my own .02

    I've got the Hauppauge WinTV GO! card. Works based on the BT878 chipset. This card goes for around $50 or so. Mono sound, but you can upgrade to better versions. Or, do what I did and pipe the feed into your Hi-Fi VCR and go from the VCR's audio out to your sound cards line in. Takes care of the sound issues!

    The BT878 option is in the kernel tree, albiet quite hidden. You have to enable (IIRC) I7C(?) support, and then it is available under Video4Linux options.

    Sorry I can't be more helpful as to what option you have to enable, I'm at my in-laws for the weekend, and have only built one 2.4 series kernel.

    If you're going to be doing any video capturing, go for one of the more expensive cards, as the WinTV will only cap at 320x240.

    Hope I've given some food for thought. Good luck!

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