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)

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."

also k3b (kde gui burning software) has a menu titled "encode video" but I don't know much about it so I don't know what it does :)

Adam

On Monday 01 March 2004 10:42, 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.

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?

Like others, I would also recommend dvdauthor. Takes a while to get to grips with; apart from the manpage there's a good article at

http://mightylegends.zapto.org/dvd/dvdauthor_howto.php

Some other comments. The quality produced by a software MPEG encoder is inversely proportional to its speed. The fast ones on Windows from the likes of Ligos are crap. Take a look at a clear blue sky; if it has bands of shade use a better encoder or at least a higher bitrate.

I use 'transcode' to convert DV camera files and to transcode DVD VOB files into MPEG for various nefarious purposes. It's a bit of a bugger to set up as it requires dozens of other things to be in place before it'll install, but well worth the effort. Other tools worth collecting are

kino - An excellent tool for converting DV AVIs to MPEG cinelerra - A video editor. Flaky but may be worth a try. It's free, after all. dvd:rip - Does what it says on the tin, but mostly needs... libdvdcss - Illegal in the US and Germany. Need I say more?

Finally, DVD video players vary widely in what they will play. Many will balk at anything that is in the slightest bit unusual. For £55 Ebuyer will sell you a Ronin P80H model that plays damn near anything you throw at it; folders of JPEGs, MP3s, VideoCDs etc, even raw MPEG files on CD or DVD. Ronin are a huge but little-known Chinese outfit; it's not a badge job.

-- GT