newbies question about tv

Hi all,

I am a *real* newbie to linux, so please have mercy ....

I have a tv-card and watching tv with motv works fine. Is there a tool with which I can record shows and later watch the recorded shows? (I have suse8.0)

Regards, Catherine.
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IMHO you'll need "mercy" for what you want to do. <grin>

If your "tv-card" is a "video capture" card, like the one I'm
using - ATI AIW (All In Wonder Pro) you have a "start." My AIW is old and obsolete, like me, with many newer models and brands available. <grin>

You'll first have to search to see if your card is supported
for video capture.. If you have plenty of time on your hands - proceed further.. If not - try and find a way to do this using, pardon me, Window$, with any software bundled with the card if, in fact, it is a "capture" card.. Maybe SuSe can help there..

To get a glimmer on what you're getting into you can
subscribe to one of the motion video developers:

[email protected]

With the Subject: line subscribe and the same word as body of the message, but I don't think that's needed..

They will send you a confirmation number which you'll return and then you'll be on the list.. There is an archive available and that information will be in their message to you.. Most of their messages will be way above your head but you can get a handle or what it's all about.. I know of no real "newbie" list for Linux motion video so if you find one - please let me know... :^)..

Since I'm in the midst of this and have been for weeks, I'll
be glad to share any leg work I've done but have to mention again that it's a tough nut to crack, or has been to me. I do have viewing a VCR with picture and sound and am now tackling capturing.. Most cards and software can select what they call "composite" which is the RCA plugs, separate video and sound, or the coax cable, 75 ohm, with "F" type plugs from cable or an amplified antenna signal, that they call "tuner." My software/hardware can select something like 200 channels, VHF and UHF, etc..

I'm presuming you have a "powerful" machine with plenty of
CPU speed and DRAM along with a huge hard drive as captures run into boo coo mega/giga bytes.. Typically - one minute of motion video is around 30mBytes or so, at least on my machine.. I haven't gotten into mpeg yet. Ugh... My "video" machine has a 1.3gHz Duron w/512mB RAM and a "puny" 20gB HD.. IMHO the picture leaves a lot to be desired as far as quality goes.. Certainly not as good as an ordinary TV set.. My card supports SVideo, which may be better, but my VCR doesn't.

Cheers and HTH.

Hal - in Terra Alta, WV - Slackware GNU/Linux 9.0 (2.4.20)
Proprietary Formats Unacceptable
.
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Many, but the details depend on which TV-capture card you have (and, a tiny bit, whether you are in NTSC or PAL country - some recording apps don't handle the 29.97/fps frame rate of NTSC properly) and what video-out card you have (and if you are doing video out to a monitor or a TV).

Applications to check out for recording include avirec, vcr, ffmpeg, mencoder, and a few others that I cannot recall right now These all work fine with any TV card that uses the kernel's bttv driver. I use vcr myself.

The main applications for playback are xine and mplayer. There is also aviplay and, probably, a few others. Their main need is an X driver that supports XVideo (or a really fast CPU, so that xshm can work without dropping frames) ... this is different (I think) from motv's screen display (I know xawtv is different, and I think motv is too), so don't assume you have this part working just because real-time TV watching works for you.

The most developed record-and-playback application I know of is MythTV. There is also FreeVo, which I've heard of but never looked at. MythTV works with both bttv-based cards and cards with hardware encoding that use the ivtv kernel driver.

If your distro doesn't include some of these apps (I use Debian, not SuSE, so don't know offhand what SuSE includes), you can track down the home sites of these projects through Google.

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