RE: Question on creating a video server
-Original Message- On Behalf Of Drew Tomlinson Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Hi All, OK, I'm just asking for opinions here on some application software. Like most people we have a nice big 21 TV set that will be obsolete in Feb. I have been thinking about replacing this with a big screen TV set but the prices on them are still way, way way out of my budget (I just can't see spending $500 for a TV set, sorry) ... Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get and what software works with it? I've read the thread and have to vote for a Linux install and MythTV. It will do everything you require rather well. I started down the FBSD path for a PVR and quickly ran into trouble back in 2006. From what I understand, it hasn't gotten much better due to the driver issues. Anyway, next I tried building MythTV on Fedora Core as it seemed to be a popular platform and Jerrod Wilson had a nice guide. Being from the FBSD world where the ports system worked so well, I quickly found myself in rpm hell, especially when Fedora Core didn't support my SCSI card at the time. I found a nice home with Gentoo Linux as it's portage system is much like ports. This is strange. Time-Warner cable has already told us we don't need to replace any of our TV sets. They will continue to work just fine. Since there are no over the air channels available in our area, we aren't affected by the switch to digital. But then we've always known that Ithaca (NY) is centrally isolated. B-) I would suggest taking a look at Mythdora (Myth TV on Fedora) I have been using it for nearly a year now, with a Hauppauge PVR-350 card. The CPU is an Intel dual core with 2G RAM and a 250 GB SATA drive. If you want automatic scheduling, it does require a paid subscription to one of the online schedule services. I don't use that, so I don't recall the name right now. It automatically records programs while you view them. This is so the pause, rewind and slow motion features will work. Recorded and viewed programs are stored as MP4 files, taking about 2.2 GB per hour. It will automatically delete recorded files after 24 hours, or not, your choice when you schedule the recording. vlc works very well for playback. I have also set up samba on it, so I can read and write files over my home network. Yes, I can set up and monitor it remotely. It installed Apache and a handful of web pages with full access to the scheduler. There is also an option for an IR remote control. The PVR-350 can output to a standard analog TV if you don't like the smaller computer display. There is a separate antenna input for FM radio. I haven't played with that one. My only significant complaint is that it requires MySQL. I would prefer PostgreSQL, since that is less proprietary and one of the systems I deal with at work. Bob McConnell ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Question on creating a video server
[ This discussion is probably better suited for -multimedia@ than -questions@ ] I can pick up really high quality, large, old-style video monitors from a computer surplus place near here for next to nothing. If these were for workstations rather than pee-cees, they might be composite sync or sync-on-green, and some video cards do not support them. :-( Some video cards have s-video out. There are boxes available that convert VGA to NTSC. I don't know how well they work. Note that decoding high definition video needs a lot of cpu if you are decoding in the cpu. Having Xv and XvMC offloads some of the work to the video card. I'm not aware of FreeBSD having support for these. :-( If it does, someone please let us know. OpenBSD 4.4 has a openchrome driver which claims Xv and XvMC. http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=openchromesektion=4 Note that *recording* digital TV takes vary little cpu, and isn't a problem for modern disks. It is decoding for playback that is the problem. Recording analog TV requires encoding, which requires a lot of cpu, or a hardware encoder. Digital TV is encoded at the TV station. If you have a DV camcorder you can convert the OTA mpeg2ts to DV format with ffmpeg, then ship it to the camcorder with firewire and the camcorder will convert it to NTSC and drive your TV. There are Ethernet-to-TV boxes. These have problems/limitations, so do your research and make sure it does everything you want and isn't buggy. If someone knows of one that works well with BSD and does a good job with freeze/slow/fast effects, I'd like to hear about it. If there are other methods of getting video from a BSD box to a TV, someone please let us know. I'd like to setup a PC and put a HDTV tuner card in it for over-the-air HDTV broadcasts, and use that as a TV. Couple of advantages to this method: computer tuners tend to provide more info which can be useful when debugging reception problems, and computer tuners give you recording capability like a VCR. For tuners, first decide if you want PCI card, PCIe card, Ethernet, Firewire, USB. Then see what you can find a BSD driver for. Ethernet doesn't need a special device driver, assuming you have Ethernet. Not sure about Firewire tuners. For PCI cards, there are FreeBSD drivers by John-Mark Gurney and Jason Harmening. Anish Mistry was/is working on a USB driver, I don't know what the current status is. Most computer tuners are PCI, but newer computers come with fewer and fewer PCI slots. They are even building mainboards with zero PCI slots (PCIe only). So Ethernet, Firewire and USB tuners have an advantage of not needing a PCI slot. They will even work with laptops. And you can have several tuners for those times when they schedule 4-5 good shows all at the same time (rare but it happens). Beware that the very small tuners without the tin can RF tuner are likely to have more reception problems than a tuner with a proper tin can RF tuner. ATSC reception does not degrade gracefully like NTSC. And there isn't enough safety factor. So get the best antennas you can find, and good quality well shielded coax. Having more than one make/model of tuner can be helpful. For UHF you might need to try both an 8-bay and a yagi antenna. (The don't make 8-bay for VHF, they would be way too large.) Software: mplayer, xine, ffmpeg, and so on. Jason Harmening's cx88 driver comes with an app for recording. You can schedule recordings with at(1). If you like the giant bloatware approach there is myth. We also have a ton of DVD's and I'd like to rip these to video files and put them on the PC. Then you will need a ton of disk space. If you like to archive TV shows you will need a ton of disk space. } Why not just get a digital converter and keep using your nice TV? Pro: these supposedly have the newest and best demodulator chips which should mean better reception, but don't count on it. There is more to these things than just the demod chip. Cons: if you want to record, you'd have to kludge something up. If your TV suffers from dot-crawl, you'll want s-video rather than composite or RF, and CECBs with s-video are rare. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Question on creating a video server
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John Almberg Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2008 3:38 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Question on creating a video server On Nov 8, 2008, at 1:40 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Hi All, OK, I'm just asking for opinions here on some application software. Like most people we have a nice big 21 TV set that will be obsolete in Feb. I have been thinking about replacing this with a big screen TV set but the prices on them are still way, way way out of my budget (I just can't see spending $500 for a TV set, sorry) Why not just get a digital converter and keep using your nice TV? I had considered that. Currently my 21 TV has an RF input only, no composite, no S-video. I'm feeding it from a VCR that does have composite input/RA jacks, but no S-video. I have a DVD player feeding the VCR with composite output/RCA. I have a Toshiba laptop that has a composite output DVD player. I have used this to watch DVD's and also AVI files. The quality is noticably worse than watching them on the laptop LCD screen. Of course, sitting 8-9 feet away from the TV set that is hard to notice. I had originally thought in building the video server to just feed the VCR with composite output from a video card - in fact, I have a vga card in the video PC that has composite output. Then, buying one of the really cheap HDTV converters and feeding the composite output of that to the VCR - or maybe picking up a composite-input video switchbox. But then I started thinking about how ugly such a solution would be. Worse, the DVD player itself is getting old - it's an Apex - and I've had 2 other Apexes and both have failed due to old age, now. Also the VCR is getting old too. That is why I was thinking maybe just go with a cheap VGA monitor instead of a TV set, use a HDTV usb tuner, and get rid of the DVD player and the VCR. Really, the idea is that this isn't a permanent solution. Ultimately I am planning on going to a LCD tv set. This is just to tide me over for maybe a year. About the only thing that we actually watch on broadcast anymore is the Late Show with Jay Leno. And even that is very trying. The simple fact is that if there was a TV show that I'd like to watch, I'm no longer willing to sacrifice my time to commercials. For example, take Sara Conner Chronicles. We loved all the Terminator movies and I'd love to watch that TV show. But, we are going to wait until the entire TV show is finished, (most shows don't last more than 8-9 seasons) then we are going to wait until they release the entire run of shows in one large boxed DVD set. Then I'll watch it. Consider for example Babylon 5. We bought all 5 seasons of that in one fell swoop - $250 for the set I think it was. There's 110 episodes there. Each one when aired was an hour - with 20 minutes of commercials. That's 36 -hours- of commercials for the entire season and we aren't talking the movies. Well, I don't know about anyone else, but my time is worth a lot more than $6.94 an hour. ($250 / 36 hours) Now it is true we watched Bab-5 when it aired. But, that was a decade ago, we didn't have the option of paying to opt-out of commercials. And we also missed a few episodes anyway. Watching them nowadays, without the commercial interruptions, it's the way TV should be. Far more enjoyable way to spend some time. We are doing this with Star Trek Enterprise. Both my wife and I are ST fans and we tried watching Enterprise the first season. But we just couldn't do it. Having to deal with setting the timer on the VCR (since the air times were never convenient) was a pain to have to remember - as you know shows will go to repeats without warning in the middle of a season. And then watching the show and having to fast-forward through the commercials was an even greater pain - you just start getting into the story and it breaks for commercial. Well, neither my wife and I suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder where we need that commercial break to reboot our brains. It really ruined the stories. So we gave up and just waited. Eventually, as all things in life do, Enterprise ended. This Christmas we will get the boxed set and start watching it from the beginning. Also, more and more of the shows these days are on the web. If there's a show we want to watch, why would we want to watch it on network TV and suffer through all the commercials when we can just stream it off the same network's website -without- commercials? Take Saturday Night Live, well that's not a show I'd really want to bother archiving - it's really not classic TV - but it is sometimes fun to kill an hour watching it. The web is great for that. And once more, the 1 or 2 national commercials you might have to deal with watching the show over the Internet are far better than the local network affiliate which inserts a lot
Re: Question on creating a video server
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Hi All, OK, I'm just asking for opinions here on some application software. Like most people we have a nice big 21 TV set that will be obsolete in Feb. I have been thinking about replacing this with a big screen TV set but the prices on them are still way, way way out of my budget (I just can't see spending $500 for a TV set, sorry) I can pick up really high quality, large, old-style video monitors from a computer surplus place near here for next to nothing. I'd like to setup a PC and put a HDTV tuner card in it for over-the-air HDTV broadcasts, and use that as a TV. We also have a ton of DVD's and I'd like to rip these to video files and put them on the PC. Then when anyone wants to watch a movie they just watch it off the PC. I've already started doing this under Windows and it works great - it's even better since I can remove all those movie previews that the studio wants to force you to watch. Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get and what software works with it? PREFERABLY cheap - since ultimately we likely will get a big screen TV set once the prices fall. I've read the thread and have to vote for a Linux install and MythTV. It will do everything you require rather well. I started down the FBSD path for a PVR and quickly ran into trouble back in 2006. From what I understand, it hasn't gotten much better due to the driver issues. Anyway, next I tried building MythTV on Fedora Core as it seemed to be a popular platform and Jerrod Wilson had a nice guide. Being from the FBSD world where the ports system worked so well, I quickly found myself in rpm hell, especially when Fedora Core didn't support my SCSI card at the time. I found a nice home with Gentoo Linux as it's portage system is much like ports. The biggest issue with OTA HDTV streams is that the processing power required to playback is pretty significant. I used an Athlon XP 2800 and it was barely adequate for HDTV. I had to suffer occasional skips and pauses but it was still watchable. I have since upgraded to a Athlon X2 3800 and the dual cores have really helped out. One can playback while other system tasks are handled by the other core. Another issue is that HDTV is huge. About 8 GB per hour. However if you have the hardware around and want to give it a try, I suggest the HDHomerun tuner. It's a network attached dual ATSC tuner that works well with both Windows and Linux for about $160 as I recall. MythTV supports it directly as well. With that, a spare PC, and some drive space you could at least experiment. And the beautiful part is that once you get your nice, new LCD, you will have already built the PVR and will continue to enjoy commercial free television. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. I love my MythTV build and wonder how I ever watched TV without it. Cheers, Drew P.S. I was born in 1965 and remember the way tv was as well. :) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Question on creating a video server
On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 22:09 +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get and what software works with it? mplayer play video files fine. no idea about HDTV tunes Mplayer works great, so does Xine. Thats what I use- I use mplayer for recording using the dumpstream option and do post processing later with mencoder. The problem lies with getting the tuners themselves to work due to lack of drivers... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Question on creating a video server
On Sat, 8 Nov 2008 10:40:26 -0800 Ted Mittelstaedt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get and what software works with it? we found it awkward to do it on freebsd so used kubuntu. we tried lifeview flyvideo 2000 tv card which worked fine with mythtv and kdetv, but couldn't pick up the cable station we think due to our location in canada. for ripping we used perl's dvd::rip. our harddrive can't hold too many shows so we just use the dvd player on the computer now to play them. -- In friendship, prad ... with you on your journey Towards Freedom http://www.towardsfreedom.com (website) Information, Inspiration, Imagination - truly a site for soaring I's ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Question on creating a video server
Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get and what software works with it? Look up MythTV. it's the opensource alternative to Windows Media Center and has a lot of nice functionality. It is in FreeBSD ports too. -Sean ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Question on creating a video server
On 11/08/08 11:14, Sean Cavanaugh wrote: Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get o and what software works with it? Look up MythTV. it's the opensource alternative to Windows Media Center and has a lot of nice functionality. It is in FreeBSD ports too. Although MythTV is available in ports, there are significant disadvantages to running MythTV on FreeBSD. First, most TV tuner cards don't have corresponding FreeBSD kernel modules. Second, MythTV uses the Video4Linux API, which of course doesn't exist on FreeBSD -- instead, you hack the kernel to emulate V4L. Third, there is terribly limited LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) support, and most people will want to use their remotes with their MythTV installations. I love FreeBSD, but running a PVR solution that is so closely tied to Linux (V4L, LIRC) is a bit of a hack. Don't get me wrong -- I tried it and discovered that the community has made significant progress towards getting it to work. But at the end of the day, I wanted a fully-functional PVR, not months of writing drivers and hacking V4L into the FreeBSD kernel. That's why I eventually made the decision to run MythTV on Linux, even though I'd *much* rather administer a machine running FreeBSD. -- Benjamin Lee signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Question on creating a video server
Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get and what software works with it? mplayer play video files fine. no idea about HDTV tunes PREFERABLY cheap - since ultimately we likely will get a big screen TV set once the prices fall. Ted ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Question on creating a video server
On Nov 8, 2008, at 1:40 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Hi All, OK, I'm just asking for opinions here on some application software. Like most people we have a nice big 21 TV set that will be obsolete in Feb. I have been thinking about replacing this with a big screen TV set but the prices on them are still way, way way out of my budget (I just can't see spending $500 for a TV set, sorry) Why not just get a digital converter and keep using your nice TV? https://www.dtv2009.gov/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Question on creating a video server
On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 10:40 -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: Hi All, OK, I'm just asking for opinions here on some application software. Like most people we have a nice big 21 TV set that will be obsolete in Feb. I have been thinking about replacing this with a big screen TV set but the prices on them are still way, way way out of my budget (I just can't see spending $500 for a TV set, sorry) I can pick up really high quality, large, old-style video monitors from a computer surplus place near here for next to nothing. I'd like to setup a PC and put a HDTV tuner card in it for over-the-air HDTV broadcasts, and use that as a TV. We also have a ton of DVD's and I'd like to rip these to video files and put them on the PC. Then when anyone wants to watch a movie they just watch it off the PC. I've already started doing this under Windows and it works great - it's even better since I can remove all those movie previews that the studio wants to force you to watch. Has anyone done this with FreeBSD and open source software, and has recommendations on what hardware to get and what software works with it? PREFERABLY cheap - since ultimately we likely will get a big screen TV set once the prices fall. Try the multimedia list, but for the most part (from my experience) the modern tv tuners aren't really supported by FreeBSD (correct me if I'm wrong) natively. Some are experimental and they're the hauppage tuners, and then only a limited selection of them with limited features. Another option maybe to try and get some of the linux drivers working using linux compat_kmod- if you're really savvy that is... Its been a real pain for me too, you're only other option is to use a linux box (with greater driver support) which is what I'm using myself right now until I can get the time to help in writing drivers for the newer chipsets required for dvb. Check linuxtv.org for more info on cards and chipsets and linux compatibility. Good luck- there are some really cool options available to you once you go down this path: like piping the transmission around your network using multicasting so you can watch on just about every computer in the house, setting up a personal, customised, tivo like system, and much much more. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
