What capture/tv out card for linux?

[metageek]

I am planning on dedicating a PIII 550Mhz machine runing Linux to be a Audio/Video station. I am trying to decide which would be the best option for video capturing and output to TV. I am not necessarily looking for the cheapest, but will not afford PRO-level equipment (>$700 cards) . Obviously, I need a capture card and a card that sends NTSC out to the TV. I' ve heard about two cards that seem could be a complete solution:

-Matrox Marvel G400-TV
-ATI all-in-wonder Radeon 8500 DV

A friend that has the Radeon 8500 is not happy with the drivers. The G400 is no longer available, now it is the G450-TV (does linux have good drivers for this?). Apparently best drivers for V4L are for the WinTV type cards, but I hear the capture quality of these cards is not the best.

The other (attractive) option would be to get a graphics card with just TV-out (I could use the original Matrox Millenium G400 dual head that the computer still has) and get a decent external capture card: the Canopus ADVC-100 (If I ever find it in stock). I know this does not have TV tuner, but I would get signal from a satelite tuner.

I would like to hear what others have experienced with this type of hardware for linux. Would be great to hear about working solutions, even if different from what I propose. Most of all problems is with existence of drivers I guess...

[mats.hogberg]

Well, last night I got the GeForce drivers from nVidia installed, and Tux Racer now runs like a rocket. To boot, after installing NVTV, I can switch from monitor only to monitor+TV at the click of a button, as easy (if not easier) as with TVTool for WIndows. The gfx board is fitted with a Chrontel TV chip. So if you're looking for a gfx card with Linux support and TV Out, I'd recommend some GeForce based model. (Mine is a now old GeForce 2 MX)

/Mats

[sterno]

The WinTV cards (actually any bt8x8 card) do work well in Linux, though I never used that machine for capturing. For quite a while my 200MHz Pentium (pre-MMX) with a WinTV card was my only TV. I used xawtv to watch, both windowed and full-screen. Eventually I just used my VCR on the RCA jack as the tuner so I could use the VCR remote to change channels. A lot of TV tuner cards, including the WinTV cards, don't tune in as well as VCR tuners do. If you get a WinTV card and don't use an external tuner then you'll probably have to adjust the fine-tuning in the software.

I don't know where you heard that the capture quality on WinTV cards was poor, it's usually considered pretty good. It won't be as good as something like an ADVC-100, but that's a firewire device and firewire support in Linux is still in the early stages of development - you shouldn't assume that you'll be able to use it. Actually right now you should probably assume that you won't, the best-supported firewire devices seem to be external drives.

Matrox cards are pretty well supported for video. Matrox is a company that wants people to be able to use their cards, so they provided a lot of support to the XFree86 developers to help them get acceleration and so forth working. But I don't know how good the TV support is, it seems to me that it used to be pretty weak because Matrox couldn't release the specs for some of the third-party components they'd used.

ATI and Nvidia have both tried to leverage Linux support as a pure marketing move. ATI did it by releasing just enough hardware specs to allow the XFree86 people to hammer together decent 2D support, but held back all the 3D and multimedia support. Nvidia is playing it smarter than ATI did, they're releasing closed-source drivers instead of hardware specs but they're supporting just about everything their cards can do. They don't gain favor among hard-core open source people, but they get the converts/refugees from Windows who just want a better alternative.

[metageek]

Thanks for the tips, guys. I have chosen to not buy a new all-in-one card but use the matrox millenium g400, and buy the Canopus ADVC-100. The good news is that the ADVC-100 works great under linux kernel 2.4.20, as is also confirmed in
http://www.linux1394.org/cgi-bin/view_device.cgi?id=475

Now I'm searching for all kinds of video processing software for linux. Heard that Cinelerra is a great package...