I thank you for your comments on Mythtv and Fusion HDTV.
I found your comments interesting and sensible description of what's involve in order to get FusionHDTV going.
Ordinarily, I'm not challenged with the entertainment aspects of Linux or Open Source but after reading your comments I went and bought FusionHDTV for $198.00.
I started installing two days ago and I'm still working on it. I got to the stage where the driver for DVICO recognizes the device as shown by a dmesg command; I completed installation of MythTV to the point that I can run utilities (Setup, Config, etc) which include interfacing with MySQL; and I got Linux Infrared Remote Control (lirc) software running.
As you mentioned, it's a messy business this installation of the driver and application to get FusionHDTV and MythTV working. MythTV has substantial number of dependencies. Thanks to http://www.wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php the installation went smoothly with few detours and little disruptions.
I'm running Linux 2.6.8.1 instead of 2.6.5 or 2.6.7 the versions for which patches are provided. I did the patches manually and line by line which took a bit of time as I had to recompile the kernel and test a number of times to get it right.
I'm also running the latest lirc-0.7-pre8 which again has to be patched manually because the patches available are for pre4 version.
Whilst my installation is not useful at this stage since I cannot recieved signals or do anything, I'm happy with the outcome of my effort.
My configuration:
FC2 with kernel-2.6.8.1 ATI Radeon Video Card Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHZ FusionHDTV 200GB ide drive
I enclose the output of my dmesg:
I'm not sure about this line.
....... cx8800[0]: couldn't register DVB module .......
#dmesg
Linux video capture interface: v1.00
cx2388x v4l2 driver version 0.0.4 loaded
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:01.0[A] -> GSI 12 (level, low) -> IRQ 12
cx8800[0]: found at 0000:02:01.0, rev: 5, irq: 12, latency: 32, mmio: 0xf2000000cx8800[0]: subsystem: 18ac:db00, board: DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T1 [card=10,autodetected]
cx8800[0]: i2c register ok
cx8800[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
cx8800[0]: registered device vbi0
cx8800[0]: couldn't register DVB module
cx8800: Initialised TS code, frames_per_irq: 512, frames_to_buffer: 10240
cx88_register_dvb_module
Trying DVB attach on card d707c000
DVB: registering new adapter (cx8800[0]).
DVB attached to dev d707c000, dvb: c25db400
DVB: registering frontend 0:0 (DVICO FusionHDTV DVB-T1)...
[EMAIL PROTECTED] cx88-0.0.4+dvb]#
Toliman wrote:
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.)
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.
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