[mythtv-users] Hauppauge Win-TV 878/9 (???)

Nick Morrott knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Tue Nov 27 09:11:20 UTC 2007


On 20/11/2007, Andrew Dixon <andrew.d.dixon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've got a kinda crappy old computer (its a Cisnet Circuit City special)
> with a Hauppage Win-TV (series 878/9 I think) that I've dropped into it.
> I'd like to upgrade to MythBuntu from windoz (I can't even watch TV and surf
> the web without win crashing) but I'm not sure if my card is supported.  I'm
> a little hesitant to go ahead with the install and just find out because the
> last time I tried to install Ubuntu ( 7.4) I almost lost the windows
> partition.
>
> Anyway, if anyone has any experiences with Hauppague WinTV cards I'd really
> like to hear about them.

On Windows, you want to look into the BTWinCap drivers, which were
much better than the Hauppauge counterparts when I last used them
(~4yrs ago)

The 878/9-based WinTV cards (framegrabbers) require the CPU to encode
the raw video from the card "on-the-fly" during recording, which can
be an issue if you have a very slow CPU, although a P4-class CPU is
fine. Using multiple framegrabber cards can require sizeable CPU power
as each card's video needs to be encoded in realtime.

If you want to add more capture cards to your system in the future,
hardware capture cards (Hauppauge PVR 150/500) and digital (ATSC/DVB)
tuner cards - which encode video on the capture card, and demodulate
the RF signal into a bitstream, respectively - allow for multiple
additional cards with only a minimal increase in CPU load.

-- 
Nick Morrott

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