General Info

There is support for the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR series of cards in Freevo, especially the WinTV-PVR 250/350 cards have recently been getting a lot more attention. These cards have a hardware mpeg encoder, so they are perfectly for recording from analog input even if you have a weak CPU. Moreover the WinTV-PVR 350 has a TV-Out, which can be used to display Freevo on a TV.

IVTV Driver

The drivers for these cards are under active development (see http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page) and are part of the official kernel since version 2.6.22. In addition you need to install ivtv-utils. If you want to use the TV-Out of a PVR-350 with X11 you also need to install xorg-video-ivtv. For more information have a look at http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Download. If you have to install the driver from source, it basically boils down to:

Compiling and installing the modules (i.e. make && make install)
Making sure you have the firmware for the cards in /lib/modules. There is a utility included with the driver package that will help you with this called ivtvfwextract.pl. Run it with the location of the windows driver package as its only argument (defaults to /mnt/cdrom) and it will do the rest.
Loading and testing the driver (the module is called ivtv)
Putting the options and module dependancies into your modules.conf file
Setting up the module(s) for autoloading on boot

PleaseUpdate: Put some info here, how to use and test the card without Freevo

Configuration of Freevo

For watching TV and Recording have a look a this
If you want to use the remote receiver of a ivtv card, you have two options. You can either use Lirc together with the Kernel Event Interface (see LircDevInput) or the Kernel Event Interface standalone.
If you have a PVR-350, you also might want to use the TV-Out of that card. You can use the TV-out as a standard framebuffer device for X. Once you get X working with this framebuffer device freevo works with it just like any other X display (see TV-Out of PVR-350).

Notes for the IVTV driver

With older versions of ivtv, you might get DMA errors. Possible causes:

you have a CPU frequency changer daemon running. Disable it: the PVR hardware doesn't like that at all.
software or hardware RAID can also cause it
el cheapo graphics cards using main memory as the framebuffer also cause similar problems.
older via motherboards are particularly prone to this.
in general, VIA MBs are more sensitive to this issue than nVidia MBs, and Intel MBs seem to be the best.

The root cause is a buggy DMA engine and/or hardware of the cx23416. The Hauppauge PVR500 is actually the only card that seems to avoid this problem (mostly) due to the PCI bridge that seems to isolate the cx23416 from most PCI DMA issues.