[Tfug] Radio/TV cards?

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 9:37 PM, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I'm looking for hardware so I can receive 2 AM/FM radio stations
> and 2 broadcast (CATV or OTA) video channels.
>
> How these capabilities are distributed among the hardware is
> flexible.  E.g., 2 radio tuners on a PCI card, a TV tuner on
> some other card.  Or, radio+TV on a single card.  etc.
>
> Anyone with first-hand experience using anything like this?
> Or, pointers to "recommended" products?
>
> Also, any idea as to the approximate resource load that their
> uses entail?

Don,

I'll +1 what Harry said as well and add a few small bits...

You didn't mention what quality is acceptable for the video, that is,
whether standard definition video is okay.  I've been a very happy
used of MythTV for just under ten years now.  I have not yet got a big
enough push to fully upgrade my system to HDTV.  The CPU and video
card can handle it as can the HDTV/monitor it is plugged into.  The
video encoder is still SD, though.

I've been using Hauppauge products for a long time now.  Their SD
products were always top notch, however I cannot say much about their
HDTV products as I haven't used any.  I am using a Hauppauge WinTV
PVR-250 which can take SD input from S-video, RCA, or coax and output
an MPEG-2 stream of configurable quality.  This model also has an FM
tuner available at /dev/radio0, but I am not currently using it (no
antenna).  If your card already has an OTA (old non-digital) TV audio
tuner then it makes sense to add the few extra bits to allow the user
to also tune in FM radio stations.  Of course, this also means that
the two functions are mutually exclusive.

I've also used the PVR-150 card in another system.  It seems to have
some different hardware/chipsets, but as near as I could tell it has
identical functionality to the PVR-250, at least for the parts I used.
 At the time, though, it was a decent amount cheaper than the PVR-250.

I haven't had the time or resources to upgrade since that means
getting a new DirecTV set-top box that outputs HD, that I can still
control from the PC (changing channels, etc.), and that preferably
doesn't have its own DVR built-in.  I'll also need to upgrade the
drives in my RAID to increase capacity and move from RAID-5 to RAID-6.
 Oh, and a new HDTV encoder/receiver of some sort, probably the HD
HomeRun that Harry suggested.

You mentioned two broadcast channels and multiple cards, so I'm
guessing you want to receive/record both simultaneously.  Again, if SD
is acceptable, you can try the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500.  This card is
essentially two PVR-150s on a single card.  Its inputs are a bit
odd... it has two coax input connectors, one for TV and one for FM
radio.  Internally, the TV input's signal is split, and this means
that actually finding a way to use this card now that OTA analog
signals are gone is rather difficult.  Again, with some older hardware
set-top boxes, you could configure one to output on channel 3 and the
other on channel 4, and then use PC connections to those set-top boxes
to actually control channel changing.  Probably too limiting and more
trouble than it's worth.

Harry also mentioned the BTTV chipset cards.  The first TV/radio card
I had was one of these and it was on this card that I made use of the
FM tuner.  I do not know if it is true for all of these cards, but the
one I had contained only a framebuffer for the TV data and no MPEG
encoder.  This meant that it was mostly suitable for live video.

As for performance:  the BTTV card I had (this was just over ten years
ago) had very high system requirements if you wanted to record video
since it was a lot of data to move and it had to be encoded by the
CPU.  Thyroidl



--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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