OT: How best to record "off-the-air" HD-TV?

[fouldragon at aol.com]

PC HDTV cards are increasingly cheap and effective, but I can't speak 
with any certainty about Linux support for a given model.  Supposedly 
the DVICO FusionHDTV cards work, and are a bit cheaper than the PCHDTV 
(about $100 for the base model, versus 130), but I blew mine up before 
trying it under Linux.  The card was a bit flaky overall anyway 
(crashing possibly because of poor Windows drivers)  I switched to a 
Leadtek HDTV Cinema which people can't even seem to get working under 
Windows.

Supposedly recording HDTV is easier than SDTV because it's already in a 
digital-packaged format and just needs to be plumbed to the right place.

As for the cards themselves, though, a lot of them are fairly 
processor-intensive, due to much of the decoding being handed off to 
the CPU.

I note that decoding a 480i broadcast seems to draw about 15% of my CPU 
(an Athlon X2 4600+), and a 720p or 1080i one, about 35%.



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