>The Philips tda10045 and the nxt6000 can receive both UHF and VHF. And
>they are a bit more sensitive.
cost isn't much of an issue, so we will probably go with one of these cards.
>Note that you need en external (hardware or software) MPEG decoder
>unless you use the fullfeatured card.
We plan on using the device as a video server running VideoLan server (www.videolan.org)
>The stepsize is usually 62500, 166667 or 250000kHz, refer to the source
>for details. But why should you want to know this, after all you should
>be able to tune to the continous frequency spectrum if the driver is
>properly coded, right? The AFC is doing the rest...
The step size is determined by a lot of factors. It is more hardware dependant that software dependant. It has to do with PLL's and filters. I hope you meant 250000 Hz instead of kHz. If we can get a card that can tune with a step size of 62,500 Hz, that would be amazing. It would be cheaper and perform better than our current product. By cheaper, I mean a lot cheaper. We do all custom electronics for our devices and they cost at least $10,000 to produce.
Would Debian or Suse be good distributions for this project? If I have to get the plain kernel, what packages do I need to get to make this work? I do not need X windows. I just need to get the video in, tune the card and use video lan to broadcast the stream. A virtual private network would be nice. I think this can be done with ssh.
Thank you all for helping,
-Brian