TV tuner or video capture card recommendation

[Gilboa Davara]

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Shlomo Solomon
<shlomo.solomon at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a VERY old no-name PCI TV tuner which has started to cause
> problems (choppy video and no sound). Until recently it worked fine
> and I could watch TV using TVtime or XawTV. I honestly don't know if
> the problem is software (maybe caused by an upgrade?) or hardware (a bad
> cable or connection or the card itself). But because it's so old, it's
> probably not worth saving.
>
> There are lots of articles on the net about hardware, drivers,
> installation, what works or doesn't, etc. But I'm looking for firsthand
> experience. For example, I've seen various articles about EasyCap or
> EZCap working/not working. I do know that there are several similar
> pieces of hardware using different chipsets, so it's hard to depend on
> these articles. In fact, about a year ago I bought a card on eBay but
> had no luck getting it to work.
>
> My needs are really simple:
> 1 - USB connection
> 2 - can capture analog video and audio from a YES "MEMIR"
> 3 - works on Mageia and/or Raspberry PI Raspbian
> 4 - preferably work with TVtime, but any other workable software is OK
>

I'm using the Hauppauge HD PVR (I think its the 1212) to manually
record (via bash scripts) programs at 720P from a HOT set-top box
component connector.
(In essences, I simply cat /dev/videoN into file using cron).
It uses the in-tree hdpvr drive, so it should work out-of-the-box on
most/all modern distributions.
CPU usage is rather low, but its currently connected to one of my Xeon
workstations, so your R-PI millage may vary.

Hope it helps.

- Gilboa