On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, barryc wrote: > >From the docs on Hauppuage's website, it appears that these cards are capable of > doing Mpeg-1/2 encoding in hardware. > > I did a little looking, and I see that the card is supported by the bttv > drivers, but I can find no mention of the hardware encoding in the bttv page. > > Can anyone give me a definitive answer on whether the hardware encoder is > supported under linux? > > I'm considering buying one of these cards (I haven't done so yet), but if I'm > going to pay ~$150 for a tuner card, I want to make sure that it can do the > hardware encoding in linux. Hauppauge has boards based on two different chipset families. Their orignal hardware MPEG board was the PVR-PCI, an 878a+kfir based board. Stock bttv can use this board as a straight tuner. There is a project to get its compression engine, the kfir chip, working under linux. http;//pvr.sourceforge.net Their latest family the PVR-250/350 is based on iCompression's iTVC processors. The 250 is encode only while the 350 includes hardware decompression. Unfortunately, it's not a general-purpose hardware MPEG codec, encoding is limited to what comes in via the video inputs and decoding is limited to outputting to the video outputs. Regardless, this is more than enough for most people. We (the IvyTV team) have gotten this family to work fairly well. We're targeting V4L2 as our interface. http://ivtv.sourceforge.net One poster to the list managed to catch 20hrs of video with only one 2-3second glitch which we think was caused by some other package. At this time we do not support uncompressed capture, mostly because we (I) can't figure out how to properly configure the card to deliver YUV data. (I get only the Y plane). And PCM audio capture also seems to be an issue. FWIW, every so often in the US, the 250 will go on sale for $100 after a mail in rebate. John
