Archived:Mailing List survey of devices in use

This is a distillation of a thread on the v4l mailing list (video4linux-list@redhat.com) with subject "Survey of v4l hardware usage for wiki"

For details, see that thread. With time, I'll fold in more and more of those details in what I hope will be a readily digestable format, but as of now, refer to the thread.

I've tried to list the cards here in some semblance of order as to how well they perform in v4l, but it's highly subjective. It's based upon how the respondents to the survey rated their satisfaction with their hardware on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being happiest.

There's also a nice link at the WLUG-Wiki with the same sort of information and some additional cards and details not yet present below. As I find these sorts of things, I'll be trying to fold them in here.

Good Cards in Use Now	Author's rank	Comments/Notes
Hauppauge Nova-T	10
Leadtek WinFast 2000 XP	10
Hauppauge WinTV-PCI-FM model 619	10
Plextor ConvertX PVR PX-TV402U	9
Hauppauge WinTV-dbx or the model 401	8/9
LifeView FlyVideo3000FM NTSC	8
pcHDTV-3000	7/8
ADS Tech Instant TV PCI (aka PTV 350)	N/A	Generally satisfied
Gateway/STB 6000402 (OEM)	6	Composite and S-Video inputs work well, but the TV/FM Tuner is untested or unsupported.
Gateway/STB 6000704 (OEM)	2	NTSC TV is known to work but requires module options and manually modprobing snd-bt87x load_all to enable audio.

Some authors strongly recommended staying away from certain cards and certain companies. Those are:

Companies to Avoid
MSI
Softwell Technology Co. Ltd. in Taipei (major GPL violator; FSF pursuing them now)
Stancom, Inc in Atlanta, GA (major GPL violator and ripoff artist)