Ben Buxton wrote:
James Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> uttered the following thing:I bought one of these cards, and am in the process of getting MythTV to work, via Gentoo and the CVS ebuilds. which in hindsight ... it's kind of messy in linux, but from other's reports (mostly anandtech at this stage), DVB software like MythTV is more reliable and less prone to GUI/overlay failures (especially during long recording sessions) which can happen in the Windows FusionHDTV software from DVICO. (the FusionHDTV software now support BDA, so a lot more windows DVR/PVR apps can now be used, including the generally annoying showshifter.)
Hey all,
I just purchased a FusionHDTV card, which I'll be installing this evening. I envisage three use cases for it:
1. Watching TV where I'm sitting in front of the computer. 2. Recording streams off the thing to watch when I have time. 3. Streaming data across the network so I can watch it on (say) my laptop.
Is anyone doing any of this stuff, and if so what software are you using
to do it? Does it work well? Caveats
anyway, the quickest way to get this working, download & unpack the patched dvb & lirc kernel modules from <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/DVICO-Linux/>. the modified cx88 tuner modules specific for the DVICO are not yet integrated into linuxtv-dvb or the 2.6.x series kernels, so it's a little messy to install but Chris Pascoe has done a great job of making 4 paragraphs describe the process seamlessly, and it does work well.
getting started is relatively quick, you just need to have a /dev/dvb/adapterX/dvrX after the modules are built & inserted, and then you need the linuxtv-dvb-apps package to tune channels in, and you can record straight from /dev/dvb. the libdvb packages and linuxtv-dvb-apps you can get from the linuxtv.org website.
DVB software packages like freevo, mythtv and kvdr, as well as kaxtv (which uses xine, recommended) or mplayer to actually view and/or test the channels. gmplayer/kaxtv/xine will run dvb://"7 Digital", or dvb://"ABC HDTV", once the channels are configured.
mythtv/freevo needs xmltv (for TV scheduling data), which needs another package called tv_grab_au from <http://www.onlinetractorparts.com.au/rohbags/xmltvau/tv_grab_au-0.6.tar.gz> , which grabs the tv guides from yahoo.com.au (the XML data comes from d1.com.au).
although there are some issues with the d1.com.au feeds (double escaped items, missing ch9 icons, incomplete program listings for hdtv channels, etc. little things), it does work. kindof.
i dont know how many other programs apart from kaxtv work seamlessly with DVB, dvbscan (to set the channel) and mplayer (to view/record) are enough to get recording and playback / transcoding to xvid working in a very rough but utilitarian fashion.
streaming DVB over a network, you might want to buffer/re-encode via mencode or VLC/VLS, or, use knoppmyth (xebian/gentoox and mythfrontend on an xbox also make a cheap tv frameserver with enough CPU to decode mpeg4 and mpeg2 + ac3 audio), as a frontend to another machine running mythtv as a server. mythweb will allow you to make changes and schedules easily over a local apache/php setup. mythfrontend will also serve this purpose.
Toliman. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
