On Thursday 08 February 2007 15:35, Jeff Simpson wrote: > > > Only if you want a limited-use frontend. You can only play mpeg2 > > > on it, which means no automatic transcoding, no dvds, etc. It is > > > a good way to breathe life into older hardware, but I can't > > > recommend this card to anyone with a fast machine. > > > > That's what I use it for: an advanced VCR. > > VCRs can fast forward and rewind. The PVR-350 can't, it's not > supported.
Not true. The PVR350 supports it, it is just never implemented in MythTV. I'm working with the video4linux guys to make a standardized API available in the ivtv driver to do this. That should make it much easier to implement. Although if anyone is interested I do have example code available that demonstrates how to use the current ivtv API for fast forward/rewind. (You can get it here: http://ivtvdriver.org/viewcvs/ivtvtv/trunk.tar.gz?view=tar, file ivtvtv.cpp. Note that this is code for testing the pvr350, not production code.) Basically the PVR350 is just that: a PVR, intended to be used in hardware recorders and things like that (and I know it is in fact used in some HW recorders). It's not for mpeg4 playback, etc. Although you can use a software decoder and XV to do the playback. The XV stuff is pretty efficient as it uses DMA to get the picture to the card, but using the framebuffer directly is really inefficient as it uses PIO to get the data to the card, which is a notoriously slow method. But if you want to play 3D games at 100 Hz refresh rate, then you're using the wrong card :-) The same is true for DVD playback: it isn't designed for that (unfortunately). Again, you can use XV for that so you can at least utilitize the excellent TV-out quality of the PVR350. To summarize: the PVR350 is great when used as a PVR, if you are not interested in that, or if it is only a small part of what you use MythTV for, then choose another capture card. But I suspect that most people use MythTV as a PVR first and foremost. BTW, if anyone is interested in improving the PVR350 support in MythTV then I'd love to help out with advice and example code. It's not something I'm going to tackle myself though out of self-protection: ivtv is already taking up too much of my time and I'm not going to add another project. Regards, Hans _______________________________________________ ivtv-devel mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-devel
