I originally worked on porting MythTV to Solaris about 1-2 years ago but OpenSolaris was still very fresh and XSun for Solaris 8/9/10 wasn't sufficient for the port back then. Many people have Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 units, but a few limitations exist on expanding these units or require more expensive hardware purchases instead of today's inexpensive COTS parts.
What started as the "ultimate gaming rig for OpenSolaris" spawned a "ultimate set-top box for OpenSolaris" project. We just got the SoundBlaster X-Fi card registered under HCL and now Nvidia has provided beta drivers for the GTX 280 video card. Slowly, more device drivers are being added to the Sun repository which makes things a bit easier than before. So, a bit of hardware engineering gives us a nice two-tuner set-top unit design and a review of MythTV for OpenSolaris. This subject has to do with desktop engineering and multimedia software applications dealing with TV recording/playback/editing using OpenSolaris-based distros. I'll get back to this once SongBird is officially in the Sun IPS repository. :o) ~ Ken Mays ------ What is MythTV? MythTV is a GPL licensed suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems. MythTV is known to work on Linux and Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel). It does not run on Windows. MythTV has a number of capabilities. The television portion allows you to do the following: - You may pause, fast-forward and rewind live Television. - You may install multiple video capture cards to record more than one program at a time. - You can have multiple servers (called "backends"), each with multiple capture cards in them. All scheduling is performed by the Master backend, which arbitrates which recording will be performed by each device. All recording requests are managed by the Master backend, so you can schedule a recording from any client. - You can have multiple clients (called "frontends" in MythTV parlance), each with a common view of all available programs. Any client can watch any program that was recorded by any of the servers, assuming that they have the hardware capabilities to view the content; a low-powered frontend will not be able to watch HDTV, for example. Clients can be diskless and controlled entirely by a remote control. - You may use any combination of standard analog capture card, MPEG-2, MJPEG, DVB, HDTV, USB and firewire capture devices. With appropriate hardware, MythTV can control set top boxes, often found in digital cable and satellite TV systems. - Program Guide Data in North America is downloaded from schedulesdirect.org, a non-profit organization which has licensed data from Tribune Media Services. This service provides almost two weeks of scheduling information. Program Guide Data in other countries is obtained using XMLTV. MythTV uses this information to create a schedule that maximizes the number of programs that can be recorded if you don't have enough tuners. MythTV implements a UPNP server, so a UPNP client should automatically see content from your MythTV system. Other modules in MythTV include: - MythArchive, a tool to create DVDs - MythBrowser, a web browser - MythControls, an application to configure your remote control - MythFlix, a Netflix module - MythGallery, a picture-viewing application - MythGame - MythMusic, a music playing / ripping application which supports MP3 and FLAC - MythNews, a RSS news grabber - MythPhone, phone and videophone using SIP. - MythVideo, DVD ripper and a media-viewer for content not created within MythTV - MythWeather MythWeb, which allows you to control your MythTV system using a web browser. With MythWeb, you can schedule and delete recordings, change keybindings and more. With proper security, you may even schedule a program over the Internet and have it immediately acted on by the Master backend. This message posted from opensolaris.org
