Hauppauge card questions....

[Davemon]

Just came across a NTSC44801 PCI card. Done some googling. Got some info...

Question is, is it useful? Not too old is what I mean?








Davemon

[stack]

It appears that it reached the height of its popularity between 97-99. So without seeing the actual card date stamp its age can be estimated about 10 years old. I am finding ones for sale for $20-$30. It uses the capture frame with BMP or Jpeg method of recording so you will probably get a .NUV file if you try to record anything with it. That format isn't the easiest to work with in transcoding..

It isn't going to be the best quality picture, but it should be quite watchable. It will use the bttv driver set under Linux (eg: most distros should pick it up automatically. A card I had that used that driver set was picked up by Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, and Ubuntu without problem) and it looks like it has MythTV support. If you do use MythTV, I would suggest that you set this to be the lowest priority recording device possible. That way it only records the shows with the lowest priorities and only when all the other tuners are busy. Having worked with and seen the quality of .NUV files in the past, I am not so anxious to deal with them again...

Honestly, if I were using that card I would drop it into an older box (p3 500ish with maybe 512mb ram) and set it up to run metv or kdetv and toss the box into the guest room so that whenever I have guests over they can watch TV late at night or something without having to go into the living room.

Hope that helps some.
~Stack~