PVR (personal video recorder) cards allows the recording of either digital or analogue TV signals onto the hard drive.

• Hauppauge PVR-150MCE: PCI based card with hardware MPEG-2 compression and one tuner for analogue TV signals

I use the driver provided by the IVTV project. To used this driver the following settings has to be enabled in your kernel, either as modules or builtin:

Device Drivers  --->
    Generic Driver Options  --->
        [*] Select only drivers that don't need compile-time external firmware
	[*] Prevent firmware from being built
	<M> Hotplug firmware loading support
    Multimedia devices  --->
        <*> Video For Linux
Cryptographic options  --->
    <M>   MD5 digest algorithm
    <M>   SHA1 digest algorithm
    <M>   SHA256 digest algorithm

Next download the newest driver from the IVTV project, I currently use version 0.40. Compile and install the drivers.

Add the following to /etc/modules.d/ivtv or similar file (create the file if it does not exist)

alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv

Next you will need to download the firmware to be used with the card. I downloaded mce_cd_v27a.zip, unzip the file, and enter the WinTV-PVR-150500MCE_2_0_30_23074_WHQL folder, then follow these instructions to obtain and install the firmware.

To tune the card install ptune, in Gentoo install it with emerge ivtv-ptune

For more information: