On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 11:55:27AM +0000, adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 10:42:30AM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
Does anyone here have any experience of running TV cards and/or DVD writers under Linux?
I have a Kworld V-Stream Xpert 883 card (Conexant CX2388x based) and wonder if there might be any Linux software to drive it, the windows software for it is generally pretty awful. Lots of "lets try and make it look like a TV/Video" and very little actual usability.
Apparently it works, you will need kernel support for it, kernel 2.6.3 has it mentioned under "Video For Linux" and the module name is cx8800. Once you have the kernel end working you will need a tv applicationt to watch tv, I use tvtime for watching tv, and keep meaning to play with mythtv for recording, but I want to buy a DVB card first instead as analogue cards don't actually produce an mpeg2 stream. (you will need to capture the stream and then encode it as mpeg2)
The WIn2k software which came with my TV card can produce mpeg2 output, that bit of it actually works fairly well, it's the recording to DVD that's rubbish. It sounds like it might be worth waiting for my next Linux upgrade and then build a kernel with TV support. I have built kernels before now but I really have a bit too much else to do at the moment to want to go down that road.
In addition I'd quite like to record the captured video (presumably MPG2) to a DVD (in 'playable on a DVD player; format). I currently have a Liteon LDW811-S DVD writer in my Win2k system, I sort of can write captured MPG2 files to the DVD writer as DVDs but the whole process is distinctly flakey. Will I have all the same problems in Linux because the software is still in its infancy or are things more 'together' unde Linux?
There is a package called dvdauthor which will possibly do what you want the Debian package description says
"dvdauthor is a program that will generate a DVD movie from a valid mpeg2 stream that should play when you put it in a DVD player."
Yes, 'authoring' is what I want, I might take a look at that as it's the Win2k authoring software that is so rubbishy. How long does it take to copy a 4Gb file across a 100Mb/s network - theoretically 400 seconds, in reality probably 20 minutes or so, I can live with that.
Are there not also some issues with Linux and DVD writers? Doesn't it need SCSI emulation or some such to be installed?