On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 00:16, Wayne Johnson wrote: > I'm looking to add video capture to my RH Linux box. I've been looking at > cards and come up with two that I think I like: > > Kworld TV Tuner, Video Capture card with Remote, Model KW-TV878RF > Price: 39.00 > > Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 Model# 980 PCI TV Tuner Card > Price: 145.00 > > Both support the 640x480 I targeted as a minimum resolution. Being NTSC > is 525 line interlaced, the extra 720x480 the Hauppage supports doesn't > seem justified by the extra cost. Resolution is a pretty meaningless measure. BT8x8 max out 720x as well. TV 'resolution' is analog horizontally. 640 gives you 'true' square pixels. 720 is what DVD and pro-grade digital video uses, (which includes 16 pixels of overscan area...) and pretty much the max you can get out of an analog TV signal. If you really want a headache, try this on for size: http://www.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/conversion/ Note, you're looking at two completely different classes of hardware here. The Kworld is a BT878 based card, which should work fine. The WinTV PVR 250 has a hardware MPEG2 encoder, and as far as I can tell it will ONLY capture in MPEG2. This makes it a foreign element to most linux TV/video software. There's a driver for it, but most software will not be able to deal with MPEG2. To watch live video, you'd have to decode the mpeg2 in software to actually display anything. Whereas a BT848/878 card can DMA live video directly to your video card's overlay plane, using no CPU time. As named, its ment for PVR use. MythTV is working on support for it. See: ivtv.sourceforge.net www.mythtv.org If you only plan on capturing MPEG2 video and/or only use MythTV, the PVR 250 would be quite slick. Otherwise a BT848/878 card would be more useful. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20031005/a6f43c0a/attachment.pgp