On 13 Mar 2002, magnet wrote: > System: Mandrake 8.0 running on a Gigabyte GA-71XE4 mobo, Athlon 1.2GHz, 256MB ram > and a 20Gb HDD. Very stable atm :) The following remarks apply to Mandrake 8.1. > > I would like to know if there is a PCI card that would enable me to view terestrial > television broadcasts like bbc1, bbc2, bbc4, bbc knowledge, itv1, itv2, channel 4 and > channel 5 using the signal from my ariel? I recently installed a Hauppage WinTV-Go card (40 pounds sterling from PC World or Dixons). This works fine for videos (SCART to video/audio cable - yellow jack to yellow input - red jack to an input on the sound card) with xawtv and the bttv and msp3400 drivers. Watching videotapes is the simplest case but all such cards come with a standard coaxial input socket for the aerial cable, AFAIK. Have not tried TV but it should be simple to set up. Xawtv has options for Television (NTSC or PAL), Composite1, which I use, S-Video, and Composite3. Consult the HOWTOs for information on loading the modules required. > > I'm not interested in satellite or pay-to-view channels, but just the standard >channels > and the free digital-via-ariel channels. > > It would be great to use the linux box rather than buying a whole new television or >buying > a set-top-box for my old television, allowing me to view true widescreen output on > a crisp monitor display. > > Do such cards also offer the possibility to capture programs onto the harddrive >allowing > for saving or just viewing later [digital VCR effectively]? Yes, in principle. Xawtv offers frame grabs in PPM or JPEG format - works, but looks a bit fuzzy from tape. The recording option generates two files in AVI and WAV formats and you will need a lot of real estate to store them on disk. The drawback I found was that playback required xanim, which I had to install. Xawtv could not find it so maybe it requires a plugin of some sort. Xanim did not recognize the format when run directly. Aviplayer/avifile does not seem to be part of the Mandrake distribution - I could only locate plugins for it on the net. Xtheater and PythonTheater require extra libraries including libpng.so.3. Mandrake 8.1 is at libpng.so.2. Maybe somebody else on the list can cast more light on the playback issue.
> Teletext would be a bonus, but not essential ;-) The box for the WinTV card says Teletext is available, but that is aimed at Windows users. I would guess that it would be available under Linux. > Hope you can help me with this question :) Go for it and sort out any problems later. Len Lawrence @ The Thistle Foundation
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