Analog TV
Introduction
Analog TV is the predecessor of DVB. In some countries like Germany Analog TV is not available anymore and is exchanged by DVB-T, in other ones Analog and Digital TV are expected to live in peaceful coexistence for a while. If you own ancient hardware like analog camcorders or want to archive your old VHS archive you may be interested in using an analog framegrabber card in the future, too.
TV standards
There are three TV standards for analog TV.
PAL
PAL (Phase Alternation Line) Standard for transmission of analog tv, developed by W. Bruch. This standard is widely used in west-europe for analog TV. Resolution: 625 Lines, 50 half frames per second, 4:3. The extension of PAL is PAL plus
SECAM
SECAM (Sequential Couleur A Mémoire) is a standard like PAL, but not widely used. (France, Russia) Resolution: 625 Lines, 25 frames per second.
NTSC
NTSC (National Television System Comitee) is widely used in America, Canada and Japan. Resolution: 525 Lines, 60 half frames per second. Less quality then PAL, therefore sometimes called Never The Same Color. ;-)
Analog TV Hardware and Framegrabber cards
For analog TV you can use
- Brooktree BT848/878 based analog TV cards using the bttv driver, good support but no hardware MPEG Encoder
- Hauppauge PVR 250/350 and similar cards based on the cx23415/cx23416 chip using the ivtv driver, please have a look at Chris Kennedys site. These cards are really good and have an onboard MPEG encoder (both cards) and an MPEG decoder with TV-out (PVR 350 only). Both of them are supported by ivtv. May these forum might be interesting for you too: link
- Hauppauge PVR cards, the predecessor of that cards mentioned before with an old-style unsupported Visiontech Kfir MPEG hardware encoder. Barely supported under linux with the pvr driver, better check the current project status before you spent too much money for these cards.
- Hauppauge WinTV USB and similar cards with the pvrusb driver
- Conexant 2388x chip (rather new) based cards driver link
- Zoran based cards like Pinnacle DC10 link
Please also check the video4linux homepage to get a complete overview of TV cards supported by the Video4Linux drivers.