My company was recently acquired and most of the staff was let go. In addition to our severance, we were allowed to keep our computers. I recently switched to basic cable to cut expenses and added Netflix. I want to turn one of these computers into a Freevo box, but I am not sure what hardware I will need in order to be compatible with Ubuntu. I am pretty sure I will need a tv tuner, a wireless adapter (I have an Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n router, so it will need to be compatible with that), a video card with vga out and a remote control adapter. It seems like USB can be used for all these things these days rather than PCI cards.
We have been hooking up our laptops to the tv, but that is a pain when the kids want to watch something and I don’t. Where do I go from here?
About a year ago, we dropped cable with the idea that we could watch most of what we wanted via an antenna or over the Internet. I bought a cheap Dell box and tried various flavors of Linux on it. We use Mythbutu, Fedora, Ubuntu, and a few others.
I use Fedora at work as my main computer. I’m very comfortable with doing development on Linux, but video on Linux is just not there. After futzing with drivers, following forums, trying two different TV tuners, switching from MythTV to Kaffeine, we gave up and installed Windows 7.
Windows 7 works and is what we use for our TV. We have a USB tuner card (from our Linux days) and have no problem. I haven’t been able to install a second tuner card which would allow me to record one show while watching another, but it’s been pretty good.
See if you can get a Windows 7 license and install Windows 7 on your box. You can try the Linux route, but you have to find the compatible tuner cards, and find the Linux drivers for them, and possibly for the monitor too.
I haven’t done the DVR thing (which is what I assume Freevo is). However, I recently tried to get a tv tuner for an (old hardware, Lucid Lynx) Ubuntu box. It was a Hauppage PCI TV tuner – couldn’t get it working and gave up. I should note that IIRC the (supposedly) “working” driver wasn’t in the initial Ubuntu 10.04 release, but was in an update. Perhaps it was still buggy and has been improved since…dunno, as I said, I gave up. The cheap Rosewill PCI wireless card I got worked without any issue at all.
At any rate, I have to say that I had trouble finding information on TV tuners and Linux, especially for hardware compatibility with an over 6 year old computer. About the only sites I came across that I thought were worth reading were LinuxTV and MythTV (particularly the Video Capture Cards page).
I realize that our situations aren’t all that comparable, but I hope that helps just a little…