Television, television, television

"The digital life of the digital man cannot be complete without a properly set television tuner and a remote control to switch the things that must be switched."
It is the same case when talking about HTPCs. So we need to buy hardware again, oh dear!? Yeah, and buying for Linux you'll have to look for some pieces of information firstly. The question is: which hardware has the best price/Linux (kernel & sw) support/time to set up/error ratio in the world. Generally this is not necessarily about what vendor to choose but rather the choice of the chip the hw manufacturer uses. Many cards may look different, yet if the chip is the same they hopefully will work well with the linux drivers for the given chipset. But in the case of IR enabled tv tuner that's not enough. The kernel module that handles the chip may not have all the PCI card identifiers enlisted in itself. So you may run into difficulties using the IR part for example. So it's a good idea to read about the chip's kernel module's supported model list. For example the kernel module's source code may help very well - looking for some PCI model constants. All in all I made an acceptable choice going with a Phillips chip based Asus hybrid TV tuner card My Cinema-P7131 Hybrid which eats analogue and digital (not HD) signal too. I need IR control, analogue signal tuning and some later option for digital input. (Of course if you will be tuning HDTV content this is unusable.) saa7134 is the magic module to make it work. (A lot of PCI tv tuner cards works with that one.)

modprobe saa7134, apt-get install tvtime, tvtime, scan for channels! tick-tack-tick-tack... Me content, watching some bullcr@p on TV. :-) Wait, we have an IR control, let me try it...okay, that was a harder thing. I'll go into details later...