The Hauppauge PVR150 is an inexpensive analog TV capture card that works well in Linux. Of course there is no official Linux support from Hauppauge, but it's relatively easy to use the card nonetheless. If you are running a newer install of Linux (Kernal 2.6.22 or greater) you don't even need to bother with installing drivers since IVTV has been added to the Kernel!

Step 1:Installing ivtv-utils
The first problem you will probably encounter capturing with this card is that it always wants to default to capturing from the tuner input. This is fine if you are recording live TV with it, but what if you are using it to transfer your VHS collection with a SVIDEO cable. You will somehow need to change the input to SVIDEO, but Hauppauge gives you no program to do this. Fortunately there is a handy set utilities freely available that lets you do this. "ivtv-utils" is in the Ubuntu multiverse and probably most other distros. To install in Ubuntu or one of the other Debian derivatives simply run the command:

sudo apt-get install ivtv-utils

What video input is my PVR150 currently using
As you probably already know, the PVR150 can capture off it's build in TV tuner (input 0), a SVIDEO source (input 1), or a COMPOSITE video source (input 2). You can always see what video input the PVR-150 is currently using by running the command:

v4l2-ctl -I

In which case you will probably see an output like this:

Video input : 0 (Tuner 1)

Step 2:Changing the capture input
To switch your PVR-150 to use the SVIDEO input run the command:

v4l2-ctl -i 1

If you are using the composite video input on your PVR-150 you will want to run:

v4l2-ctl -i 2

There are more inputs you can use. To get a listing of all of them and what number they correspond to run:

v4l2-ctl -n

If this sort of thing excites you you can find many more detail about v4l2-ctl at: http://www.ivtvdriver.org/index.php/V4l2-ctl

That should get you ready to do the capture. In the next article in this series I will cover how to do the actual capturing