When last we left our hero, he was worried that moving into the all-digital
realm of Comcast cable up in the northwest regions of the United States and how
that would affect his Freevo, and what he was going to do with his PVR-250
card...
(I'll try not to be too long-winded about this, but maybe it's already too
late.)
I elected to go with HD programming this time around, since I've got a decent
(albeit old) HDTV. They set me up with a Pace RNG110 set top box. I'm using the
component out to the TV, then cursed the death of S-Video connections and wired
the composite video to the PVR-250 in the Freevo (better than nothing, right?).
I split the audio and it seems to be working just fine for the time being.
The RNG110 has an ethernet jack (for future use), a USB port and a firewire
port. Research on the web suggested that it responded to standard DCT6200
commands over firewire, so I bit the bullet and got a cheap used firewire card
and cable. With only a little tinkering in the 6200ch code, I got it talking to
the STB and Freevo can change the channel now when it starts up recording. I'm
already thinking about improvements, like Freevo turning the STB on and off...
but I can't think of a way to tell if it's on or off (the command seems to just
be a toggle).
Always the curious type, I wondered how much luck was in my pocket. I pulled
down some DV and firewire tools to the Freevo and after a bit more tinkering,
discovered that the RNG110 is also dumping the MPEG-TS out the firewire port!
All the way up to glorious 1920x1080 HD! Jackpot! I've captured some things
manually using dvgrab, although the Freevo struggles a bit to play back
1920x1080. Also, this is the pre-decode TS data, before the box does any
on-screen overlays. That makes it perfect for recording, because it's only the
video, with no distracting graphics from the box itself.
So it's time for the QUESTIONS!
Any support in Freevo for recording video via Firewire? I've experimented with
a few things so far:
* Using dvgrab manually. It works, and mplayer has no qualms playing back the
captured MPEG2-TS data. I do get interlacing artifacts if I don't use a
deinterlace filter though. This may only be on lower-res or SD sources. I'll
check again with some true 1920x1080. It may also be settings in the DFBMGA
output driver related to interlacing. I've had to futz with those before, so
I'll futz with them again.
* DV2V4L (and similar things) that claim to take DV input and then make the
video available at the standard V4L points (/dev/video0). I haven't had any
luck with those so far. This would probably mesh best with Freevo right now,
but probably needs extra overhead to translate the video from DV to V4L.
So anyone working on something like this? I'm tempted to just try writing a
wrapper around dvgrab... but even that might be beyond my current knowledge.
Although there's nothing like a project you believe in to motivate you to learn
new things. ^_^
I have seen a few references to MythTV doing firewire capture... surely it's
the wave of the future and should be available in Freevo, even if you get
unlucky and have a locked-down cable box.
While I'm asking questions... anyone suggest a new video card for me
that would handle HD formats better? Preferably AGP, passively cooled
and with S-Video outputs at a minimum. My TV does take VGA, but only in
640x480... so I _could_ use that, but it's not the ideal situation. I
think someone had suggested an nVidia card a while back.
Ideas? Thoughts? Rants?
Cheers, and I'll have another related e-mail in just a few minutes.
James
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