digitalFAQ.com Forum - Video in Linux

As submitted via e-mail.....

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Personally I'm running a Hard Drive install of Knoppix 3.6 - which is a nice distribution to start with since you can run it in "LiveCD" mode and make sure you're not going to run into problems without installing it to that system first. Once you do install it to a hard drive you have a pretty standard Debian installation - which is one of the easier ones to add packages (software) to.

At present I have a Canopus ADVC-100 I'm doing my captures with, although the machine also has an AIW Radeon card. Mainly because my video source is being sent via a wireless adapter, and so any quality
difference is likely to be overwhelmed by what I already lose from the signal going from cable box to TiVO to wireless sender to wireless receiver :-)

For capturing I'm using the Kino software - which is mainly dedicated to DV. If I started trying to capture with my AIW Radeon I gather that there are a couple different packages I could look at (TvTime seems to
be the preferred option currently).

Editing is also done in Kino. I've tried Cinelerra, but it's a professional product (though free) that expects professional Hardware. And I'm using a 900 Mhz AMD with 394 megs of RAM for the main system.

One of the big plusses (for me) of Linux was the software RAID and USB2 support. So I have 4 250 Gig HDs in a RAID-5 configuration that is quick enough to do my captures without drops, and gives me some recovery capability. Two of the drives are internal, and two are
external using USB2 connections. Would have preferred 1394 for the external, but firewire support in Linux for anything but video is pretty shaky.

Or if you really want to "push" the envelope you could run Linux under Windows using a product like DSL embedded (at http://www.tuxs.org/dslwin.htm)