My DIY Linux PVR: The Tuner Card

Sunday, August 21, 2005

The Tuner Card

This was probably the easiest choice to make. There is really only one card that others have been able to successfully write Linux drivers for. WinTV PVR cards. Kind of ironic that the only Linux friendly, standard cable, time-shifting tuner card has the omnipresent Win prefix. The PVR250 and PVR350 are near identical except for the PVR350's ability to offload MPEG2 decompression duties onto it's on-board chip. Though as an astute reviewer points out, the hardware assist only occurs when the S-Video output from the PVR350 is used. This would be fine, but that same output won't allow on screen display of other OS video. So if you wan to be able to navigate through MythTV menus and watch the video on the same screen, you're not going to use the S-Vido on the PVR350. A a personal protest to this limitation, I'm choosing the PVR250 rather than the 350 as my tuner card.

Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 MCE for Media Center PCI TV Tuner w/MPEG2 ...
$124.84 - Mwave.com: 4.3 / 5
HAUPPAUGE WINTV-PVR 250 MCE FOR MEDIA CENTER PCI TV TUNER W/MPEG2 & FM RADIO

¶ 6:15 PM

Comments:

for what it's worth, there's a way to force the frame buffer in linux/mythtv with the ivtv-dev drivers to go through the pvr350's TV out (for menu's/etc).

obviously you're in good shape with the pvr250, but thought it was important to note that with a little elbow grease you can force more than just mpeg out through the svideo of the pvr350

# posted by

rampy : 11:07 AM

This is good to know. I read that some people were working on this type of solution, but had not known that itv had it working already. I may upgrade to the 350 once I get Myth and everything else to work.

# posted by

Bill Strathearn : 2:05 PM