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In any case, it's legal to record broadcast TV. That was settled long ago.

I'm not sure why this is a big deal. There are other ways to get high-quality MPEG videos onto your computer than this. For example, Hauppauge has recently come out with a new TV tuner with on-board MPEG2 compression... take a look here. I'll admit it's a cool hack, but it's hardly the only possible source of high-quality video like this. Claiming that this Tivo hack alone will allow a "video napster" is just silly.

I'm not sure why this is a big deal. There are other ways to get high-quality MPEG videos onto your computer than this. For example, Hauppauge has recently come out with a new TV tuner with on-board MPEG2 compression... take a look here. I'll admit it's a cool hack, but it's hardly the only possible source of high-quality video like this. Claiming that this Tivo hack alone will allow a "video napster" is just silly.

I'm sorry, I have ZERO sympathy for the guy who wants to dial in to set his clock yet not pay for TiVo service.

First thing is if you set up a shell on your TiVo, you can connect from another PC and set your time manually. You never need to dial TiVo again.

Second, come on. The guy *KNEW* that TiVo expects a subscription. How can he rationally expect TiVo to be a viable company without subscriptions?

Third, if he wants TiVo-like functionality, he could have saved a bit on his $400 investment. Buy an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder or a Hauppauge card. There are others as well.

• The Radeon (Windows solution) comes with TV on demand software - Radeon features - that are free to use thanks to the Guide Plus+(TM) TV listings broadcast in North America.
  
  
• the Hauppauge (Windows solution) - Hauppauge WinTV-PVR - even boasts about burning a show to CDR for watching on your DVD player - something TiVO CANNOT do.
  
  
• ShowShifter - a Windows-based software package for ATI, Hauppauge, and Matrox capture cards.
  
  
• The Linux solution can be found at VCR-HOWTO or linuxtv.org

This is the kind of produt that Hauppauge are offering with their WinTV PVR. It's really nothing special - just a standard TV card and software that captures and compresses the video and writes it to hard drive. I have been doing this for many years with an old WinTV PCI card and the excellent vcr program for Linux. All Sony are doing is riding the PVR hype with this one, and it seems that they're succeeding.

This is the kind of produt that Hauppauge are offering with their WinTV PVR. It's really nothing special - just a standard TV card and software that captures and compresses the video and writes it to hard drive. I have been doing this for many years with an old WinTV PCI card and the excellent vcr program for Linux. All Sony are doing is riding the PVR hype with this one, and it seems that they're succeeding.

Intellectual property control in the Linux kernel? Your comments are so trollish I wonder why I respond--you sound like Microsoft. When has this ever been an issue in the Linux kernel?

but in the event that all the major Linux distros go under ... This also proves that you haven't even read the article in question. WindRiver is dropping Slackware because it competes with its BSD offerings, not because it doesn't make any money. In fact, Slackware is one of the few profitable distributions out there, according to Mr. Volkerding. And if you're talking about distros going under, I see the publicly-traded corporate firms like Red Hat and Caldera going under long before I'd see Slackware or Debian go south.

Also, you must realize that very few corporations actually write device drivers for Linux. Drivers are written from published spec sheets and open chipset manufacturers. Case in point: My Hauppauge WinTV PCI, which uses the Brooktree Bt848 chip, a chip set is remarkably well-documented and supported.

Closed source helps copyright laws, but that's when you're trying to make a profit out of copyright and be just like Microsoft and Apple and Be and all the other "OS-sellers" out there. And I hope I don't have to reiterate this, but it's not going to happen, and it would be a fundamental slap-in-the-face to the thousands of dedicated Linux programmers who have labored for countless hours bringing an incredibly useful product to market--for free. Your shortsight and foolish mindedness is an insult to them all. You also ignore the fact that if the kernel were closed-source, it would lose ALL of existing developer base--who the hell would contribute to a corporation that has sole rights over their works, can sell it, and wouldn't even pay them in return?

with a closed-source license, and better control of the kernel, Linux could finally defeat those arguments M$ brings about You actually think Linus would bow down to baseless Microsoft FUD and do what would be immediately M$'s best interests? And I'm not even going to go into how Windows {NT,9[58],2000} is such a far superior product when compared to Linux because it has the good old Microsoft we've come to know and love over the years standing so fully by it, ready to do what it takes to ensure customer satisfaction.

Ass.

I know the idea of this isn't something people want to think of. I don't have to think about it because the whole concept is ludicrous. And I'm done debunking your noisy tripe, I've proved what a crock of shit this argument is already.

For next time, please don't post such crap like this. It makes you look stupid and it gets me all riled up. :P

--sean

Anyone play around with hardware MPEG2 encoding? I like the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR (different than the regular WinTV), but it looks like this thing is Windows only :( I'd like to be able to capture and record stuff directly to MPEG2. Anyone know about any Linux drivers for this one? The regular WinTV works with video4linux, but this one apparently does not.

I understand the guys at LinuxTV have drivers for a particular board with the Visiontech KFir chip but I've never seen this board anywhere...

The capture & compression can be done in real time, my system is an AMD K7 Duron 650Mhz running on a MSI motherboard with 64Megs of ram. I usually leave the audio uncompressed, at full PCM 44.1khz stereo. I also set DivX ;-) low motion codec at 1 sec keyframes, and 6000 (max) kbps. Average compression is 26:1, somewhere near 200 KB/sec. WIth 10Gigs free, it has more than 20 hours left for recording :) I think you could get even more if you also compress the audio, in .wma at 64kbps, but a little bit faster procesor could be needed. Ah yes, the harddisk is just a Maxtor 30G IDE drive, with UDMA enabled.

I also use a little free scheduler called "Windows Scheduler" to do the automated capture (it saves keystrokes), and virtualdub itself can stop the record after certain conditions are met (like, n minutes passed, or only n megs free on disk).

So yes, your VCR is obsolete already, get a decent CPU and TV Tuner, and have a lot of fun.

Oh, and hear this tip: do the capture at YUY2 (raw) so you can enable the "noise filter", anything from the default (17?) to below (left) should be okay. You will be amazed of the magic this does with old tapes or not good enough tv signal, then choose the compression at the "compression" menu option, so to be done in real time after the raw capture and filtering.

Of course install the DivX ;-) lossy codec, and the very useful free opensource huffyuv lossless codec, use the lossy one when you need a long recording time, and the lossless when you need quality above anything else. Same with PCM (raw) audio vs mp3/wma (lossy).

BTW: Could somebody with the knowledge please take a look at VirtualDub's and huffyuv's source code? Maybe it could be ported to BeOS and Linux, now that we have the DivX ;-) Deux source at hand it could be useful. I hope video4linux 2 is ready :)

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Sure you can watch a TV image on a monitor. I like to watch a TV in a small window while doing other work on the PC. Check out this site for some pretty cheap PCI and USB TV tuners with A/V and coax inputs.

Perhaps I should have specified "without using a PC". My thinking is more "hey, I've got this pretty good 19" CRT that's not hooked up to anything right now, why go to the trouble of getting another CRT just to watch television, which I don't do a whole lot of anyway?"

Sure you can watch a TV image on a monitor. I like to watch a TV in a small window while doing other work on the PC. Check out this site for some pretty cheap PCI and USB TV tuners with A/V and coax inputs.

Actually, Linux is a DOS App. I know, because Loadlin is a protected-mode program that runs Linux from DOS! DOS lets the program do whatever it wants. I mean, it's the running program, right?

Yeah, but you're expected to be able to return to DOS after playing the game. Which causes no end of annoyances... Saving the pointer to the INT9 handler, hmph.

Now there's a challenge for you: making LOADLIN return to DOS after you shut down Linux. It shouldn't be nearly as hard as something like Plex86, since you don't need to virtualize or anything, just save a bit of data for when you're finished.

Case in point: after removing my TV Card, my SB Live! card doesn't work at all. Under Windows, the card gets detected, and then the system locks. Hard. Under Linux, the drivers try to load, and then fail, but the system keeps going.

Ugh. I had a Hauppauge WinTV board, which you'd think would be pretty much guaranteed to work under Windows, right? Ha. It worked fine in Linux on the first try, but under a fresh Win98 with no other extraneous hardware, it would reboot 1 second after starting the TV display.

Incidentally, I don't use Windows at all now. Luckily, I'm not really a gamer, so I don't have the normal conflict of interest thing.

I like the design of RT-Linux, myself; I think a lot more could be done with a model like that.

Heh, lots of people are gushing over the possibilities of user-mode Linux. Linux -- it's a Web server, an ORB, an embedded system, and a mainframe, all in one!

--

I'm naive about these new television technologies.

What is the difference between HDTV and DigitalTV? Hauppauge has had a PCI DigitalTV card for some time now. Until just now, I thought it was an HDTV card.

NOTE:
Many Hauppauge cards have Linux support already.

this page says that it doesn't support s-video INPUT.
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WinTV is a bt8x8-based video capture card manufactured by Hauppauge. WebTV is something completely different.

Here are some I found:

TeraLogic
Hauppauge Computer Works
BTTV page

I've found the Hauppauge WinTV (despite its name) to be a great tv/video board which works quite nicely with the newest kernels. The main and only reason I didn't buy the ATI board when I was shopping was because I remembered hearing bad things about people working on driver support for them under Linux.