[NBLUG/talk] MythTV Monster Lives

[Scott Doty]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 09:43:44AM -0800, Mark Street wrote:
> 
> All the parts were in place, the Fedora Core 1 OS was loaded.  The WinTV PVR 
> 250 TV Tuner card arrived on Tuesday, today I have a fully functional MythTV 
> box with only some minor tuning of the remote control to consider.

Outstanding!  Congratulations on joinging the Linux PVR revolution. :)

I had an issue to resolve when I hooked analog cable to my Hauppage WinTV (I
had been using "composite in" from my cable box) -- neither the tuner nor
audio worked.  Turns out, after a lot of "science fair", that I had to load
a module for the audio and one for the tuner.  The modules are "msp3400" and
"tuner" in addition to "bttv".

I see you're using alsa -- have you had any trouble with audio not syncing
with the video?  Also, with alsa, I seemed to have trouble with getting the
mixer settings set up right, and MythTv was (for some reason) activating the "record
from output" setting -- the result was a weird echo/feedback situation that
was a real pain in the neck to fix with the mixer program.

My big project now, in this arena, is to find an HDTV capture card with
onboard compression.  I've found one so far, the "ORCA":

   http://www.doremilabs.com/products/orca.htm

I'm not sure about Linux support, though, although I've seen it mentioned
"Real Soon Now" on one of their old press releases.

Quick overview of HDTV capture methods:

Over-The-Air Capture.  Folks have been doing this for a while.  I haven't
tried it yet, but I'm not hopeful.  And BTW, there is a capture card out there that
is made specifically for Linux.  http://www.pchdtv.com/

Firewire.  There is software out there (hard to find) that makes a Linux box
look like a D-VHS, so you can capture the native stream.  Though the
Motorola 5100 box Comcast is distributing can support a firewire port, it
my box doesn't have one, nor (I've heard) does the firmware support the
firewire port.  So, unfortunately, this isn't an option.

Component.  The problem with capturing the component video is it really
needs to be recompressed -- and the estimate I've heard for requirements for
software compression of a 1080i stream is a 6GHz processor.  On-board
compression is clearly indicated.

Hence, capture cards like the Orca are needed that offload the compression. 
Even better, a separate box with component on one side and ethernet (or
something) on the other would be ideal -- I'm sure there's such a beasty for
the commercial broadcast market, but sheesh, just try to find one on the
web.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any ideas for HDTV capture.  Thanks!

 -Scott