TV-Tuner cards ( NTSC / PAL / SECAM ) - which works best?

[Dieter]

> > I was thinking Xv and XvMC.   IIUC the penguins have at least Xv working
> > with some ATI chips.
> 
> Xv and Xvideo work well with both the beasty and the penguin, at least
> for intel, nvidia (closed source). Xv/Xvideo are good for displaying
> video (its a good overlay api), not so good for accelerating codecs.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_video_extension
Xv does scaling and color space conversions in hardware.  Doesn't
help with codec decoding.  On the other hand, it should work with
any codec.

> XvMC works on nvidia, intel and via unichrome - I expect the new open
> source ati drivers will support it as well, sooner rather than later,
> but that does no good for anything other than MPEG-2, and from what I've
> read, is virtually no use for H264.=20

A lot of material is in mpeg2.  All US OTA DTV is mpeg2.  IIRC most DVDs
and some HD-DVD & Blu-Ray are mpeg2.  IIRC most cable and sat are mpeg2
though that may change over time.

> If you are fortunate enough though to
> get HD content in MPEG-2 format, XvMC is the meal-ticket.

I hope you are right about open source ATI drivers supporting
XvMC soon.  The sooner the better.  In a few months our
analog broadcasts go dark, so TVs and VCRs stop working.
They are selling converter boxes, but everything I've read about
them indicates that they are wintel quality crap that crash.  :-(
Most don't have s-video out.  And they don't timeshift.  The best
solution seems to be building a BSD DVR.  Recording DTV takes very
little CPU (disk space is another matter) but decoding takes a lot.