Mon Nov 8 17:30:34 PST 2004

About a month ago my Hauppage tv capture card (bt878 based) mysteriously bit the dust. It locked up the whole OS when accessed on a linux machine, and froze any windows app that tried to access it when I moved to to my windows box in a debugging attempt.

Fortunately, at the time surpluscomputers had Aitech Wavewatcher cards on sale for $10 a pop. While Aitech had impolite things to say about them, they are actually halfway decent bt878 cards. So I got a pair for $30 (S&H was a chunk as you might guess) and stuffed one in the linux/mythtv box. After kudzu went through and removed one bt878 card and then added the new bt878 card everything worked flawlessly again. I even think the picture quality is a little better, but the audio is louder and doesn’t sound quite as good. Fortunately, I’m not terribly picky about quality right now. If I really cared, I would go get some of those nice Hauppage cards with the mpeg encoders built in :-)