Choosing the right TV tuner - USB or PCI TV tuners, hardware/software, DVB? Hybrid/combo/analog?
- by Nucleon
Greetings, I'll start with some background information so you know what I'm trying to accomplish and then get to my question. I work at a Television station in the US and we are working on setting up an online DVR/Podcast system for all of our newscasts. So basically we would be recording every newscast in HD, encoding it to flv/h.264 for viewing in a browser on flash compatible and iphone/ipad devices, eventually migrating to WebM when it's browser compliant.
This task is theoretically pretty simple as it all it involves is a TV tuner device and a program like VLC, MythTV or whatever to schedule and dump it to a file, encode it with VLC/FFMPEG and push it to the streaming server.
Now to the hardware, in order to accomplish that task, should I use an internal PCI tuner or a USB 2.0 tuner? Is there a difference? The bus speeds of both are not too far apart, and is the bus speed really relevant in this case? Does it matter if the device has a hardware encoder or a software encoder?
On many sites the USB was recommended for ease of set up and use, but would it overly task a processor, or is that not a concern as long as it's a decent PC (at least duo core, 6gb ram). What's the difference between the stick USB and the Box USBs? To my understanding analog is basically gone in the US, so we would want a hybrid or combo tuner correct? How do those differ from DVB? Are there any other features or concepts which I am missing which may influence the recommended product. It would be ideal if the device which could work in both Linux and a Windows environment, to my knowledge most Hauppauge are?
Example 1: PCI Hauppage http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116033
Example 2: USB 2.0 Box http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116029
Example 3: USB 2.0 Stick http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116031
Any guidance from the Superusers would be much appreciated!
