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GO BORROW windows DRIVERS for TV and video cards

Because sometimes AC is about as smart as a box of rocks...

HDTV for your linux box

Here is a free clue, linux is not for you. Make sure you don't let go of Ballmer's/Job's hand.

Mod Parent Up.

MythTv is NOT that hard to configure. Getting the hardware working properly is.

I spent three months dinking around trying to make a name brand and a white box PVR-250 work together in the same system. When I finally gave up and bought two PC HDTV 5500 vendor supported on linux cards then it "just worked".

As the other poster pointed out, MythTV works quite well and the hauppage cards are quite good. The pcHDTV card from http://www.pchdtv.com/ also works well from my experience, I've used both. But Windows Media Center also works surprisingly well. I switched to that so I could move the PC to another room and only have my Xbox 360 hooked up to my TV (actually, I had a projector, but that's beside the point) and stream the video to that.

MCE is a little less useful than MythTv because it adds DRM to your recordings (though I hear its not too hard to remove), but if all you're planning on doing is watching it and then deleting it, then it works beautifully. It has the added benefit of it "just works" with the Xbox 360 and its remote (My experience with getting a remote to work with MythTV was less than pleasant).

Of course, I recently broke down and got DirectTV because (ironically) when the digital transition finally happened, my reception of the digital channels (in my apartment) suddenly became less reliable.

Why pay for TV? With the switch to digital, over-the-air TV is now probably higher quality than cable. Combine MythTV with one or two of these and you're all set.

http://www.pchdtv.com/

Not sure about your troubles with remotes, but that doesn't have anything to do with the TV card.

Why not build your own set top box using video capture cards that *do not* respect the broadcast flag? Ala http://www.pchdtv.com/ Outputting from your set top box via dvi/hdmi cable would not be an issue. Granted, my mother would not be able to build her own set top box and install mythtv, but I think the majority of the readers here could.

If you get digital cable, you can use any ATSC/QAM card to get the unencrypted cable channels (the bottom 20 channels or so). But it can be a bit of a pain to set up.

I had a pair of pchdtv-5500's in my myth box hooked directly to the wall (no cable box), getting the clear channels just fine.

When I moved, I switched to OTA because I'm on a nice hill and didn't feel like continuing to spend the extra money on TV each month.

Well then, if you are lucky, they might kiss you first before they screw you.

You can spend the money to set up a simple MythTV box and HDTV card that ignores the broadcast flag. http://pchdtv.com/

Pay the man or be the man.

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:_jvFfGt_BTsJ:www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DigitalTelevision+pchdtvr-1.0.tar.gz&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Aaah, google cache, I love you...

especially the directions
"wget http://www.pchdtv.com/downloads/pcHDTV-1.6.tar.gz "

The file's still up, and the patch still under the GPL:
cat pcHDTV-1.6-cx88-0.0.4-patch | grep GPL
                "GCAPTURE", "SCAPTURE", "SPLAYMODE", "SWRITEMODE", "GPLAYINFO",
+// distributed under the GPL licence.

thanks, also see here for the older version

The software is not bad, but I've found it a bit buggy, especially compared to pchdtvr, which was pretty solid. It is surprising that he would do this now, pchdtvr has been out since at least 2005. I notice that it is still available from pchdtv.com.

The author is trying to spread FUD all over the interwebs.
See:

http://www.pchdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=19528
http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DigitalTelevisionAtscap

I think someone should educate these people.

While this is a possible scenario, there is no guarantee that this is the way it will play out. Currently the broadcast flag is in limbo. Also, there exists equipment now that will ignore the broadcast flag if it is implemented (e.g. digital tuner cards from pcHDTV.) Pressure must be put upon the legislature not to implement DRM on HDTV broadcasts, they are our airwaves after all.

What's the best PC HW to drive my 50" HDMI TV, that costs under $1000 and runs a Linux PVR like MythTV, and works on NYC TimeWarner cable?

If you are asking about non-encrypted digital content on your TWC connection, there are a number of HD video cards (like this one http://www.pchdtv.com/) that can be used with a DVR package like MythTV. To feed your HD set, you will need to look at something like a DVI-to-HDMI cable for the best quality connection. I have read MythTV-related articles about VGA-to-component converters but I think using DVI-to-HDMI would be far simpler (and cheaper). You will not be able to build your own PC that can decrypt TWC's premium content. I know that you are pretty technically inclined so you may want to read-up using the firewire output of a TWC HD DVR (like the Scientific Atlanta 8000HD or the 8300HD/HDC family) to capture digital content coming from your cable box/DVR. I have not fully investigated how to use the firewire port on a TWC DVR but I have encountered a number of articles that mention using this method to acquire digital video. There is a law which requires the cable company to provide a working firewire port on DVRs. I hope this helps.

I used kubuntu with a hauppage pvr-150 mce, you can use a mce pvr-500 if you need two tuners, pvr-350 should work as well. Only real problem I have is the sound cuts out and goes to static if I leave it on for a few days (probably a driver issue), other than that it pretty much golden. To setup mythtv I used the community docs on the ubuntu website and some of the mythtv wiki.

Heres my specs:
Board: Via SP13000
Ram: 1GB Corsair XMS DDR 400
Drives: DVD-RW IDE and a 320GB SATA HD
Capture Card: Hauppage pvr-150 mce
OS: Kubuntu Fiesty
PSU: PicoPSU 120W
Fan: 1 120mm case fan

You might want to replace the thermal grease with arctic silver if you build it.
I might try hdtv when the new via board with pci-express 16x slot comes out so I can use a beefier videocard.

http://www.pchdtv.com/
http://epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=News&file=a rticle&sid=1147
Cheers

Or maybe Dell wants to throw a bone to some (Tweeter?) resellers who they've scr3wed over more than once in the past.

In any case, why bother? Is Alienware offering something unique and unobtainable elesewhere (parts)? I thought HD decoders were widely available. Some hardware even open-source

Just so you know, they say that you need their box in most cases. All of the OTA channels that they service are able to be decoded.

This is what I use with my comcast.

http://www.pchdtv.com/

May I also suggest:

pcHDTV HD-5500. $129 list. PCI. Coax input. Analog/digital tuner. Hardware MPEG encoder. Explicitly designed to work with Linux.

Silicondust HDHomeRun. $169 list. Stand-alone box. Ethernet attachment. Dual coax inputs. Dual analog/digital tuners. Hardware MPEG encoder. Can stream video to MythTV and other systems.

Jarod Wilson recommended these to our LUG. I got the HD-5500 and it works well.

Also, I am told that Hauppague has recently started packaging HVR-1600 cards in PVR-150 boxes, with no indication of the change. The HVR-1600 does NOT work with MythTV.

How about this one?

I haven't personally used this card, but apparently (according to the link) full support is in the kernel as of 2.6.20. And there's a link on that page to the page on the MythTV wiki about setting up this card (non distro-specific). There's also specific howto's for Ubuntu and Fedora. The distro-specific links do seem pretty old (FC2 and Ubuntu 2.10?), but hopefully things have only gotten easier since then.

Not for unecncrypted HD content... this card will work for both free OTA, and unencrypted cable channels.

http://www.pchdtv.com/faq.php#faq0000008

That's for non-premium/unencrypted cable. CableCard is for encrypted cable.

pcHDTV.

An important addendum applies to all of you wishing to use HDTV with a PCHDTV card. Playback of HDTV is *very* computationally intensive, and requires a Pentium class processor of at least 1.3GHz or equivalent in conjunction with a graphics card with accelerated drivers, according to the documents at http://www.pchdtv.com./ Pretty much any system built in the last two years with an nVidia graphics card will be fine.

I'd go with four of AMD's upcoming Barcelona quadcore CPUs, max out the RAM capacity, a pair of the upcoming ATI R600 video cards in Crossfire mode, one or two 30" widescreen monitors (I'm not sold on the dual screen thing), a RAID of those new 32GB Sandisk flash drives for the boot partition and a RAID of the upcoming terabyte SATA HDs for data storage so I'd never have to delete MythTV HDTV recordings (using a 3Ware SATA RAID controller?), at least a couple of HD-5500 HDTV tuners, dual boot 64-bit Vista Ultimate (for games) and Fedora 7 (for everything else, running 32-bit WinXP in a KVM instance when I have to), maybe a X-Fi audio card, probably a PC Power & Cooling kilowatt power supply, a Blu-ray burner, watercooling by DangerDen, and a suitable case (maybe a Thermaltake Mozart TX?).

And a naquada generator so I could power it all off-the-grid.

Alternatively, a Tyan Personal Supercomputer might be fun too.

You're missing the HD capture card.

Seriously, go try to find one that a normal human can afford.

Here you go, $129

That was easy enough and even native Linux drivers.

Since no one else here seems to actually give results of where to get this stuff, I figured I'd help out here.

I got all this using Froogle, so you could probably to the same:

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=Samsung+DTB-H2 60F
http://www.shop.com/op/~HDTV_Tuner_Box-prod-395058 74-52664117?sourceid=3
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=grandtec+tun-5 000

However, I completely agree, the selection sucks and you have to get mostly odd brands.

I got a http://pchdtv.com/ one and I love it for my computer (highly recommended), however, it's also nice to just have a set-top box.

There are Linux compatible HDTV cards availabe at http://www.pchdtv.com/

They're specifically marketed towards Linux users, though it does mention in the FAQ that they have 32bit windows drivers available.

Something you may want to look into and poke around on their forums to see how well they work under Windows, if that's what you're using.

I imagine you could use a HD-5500 to do it. It supports unencrypted QAM signals. If you put the box behind your Comcast box, I assume it would get the QAM signals unencrypted (the set-top box should be decrypting the channels based on your subscription level).

http://pchdtv.com/hd_5500.html

Shouldn't be too difficult to hook a UHF cable up to one of these

Aye, my MythTV backend with the disk dump has two 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives in a RAID 0 array. The frontend has three HDTV capture cards(two HD-5500 & one HD-3000). A Lowly 100mbps full-duplex network link between the two boxes.

I'm able to record three HD streams at once via nfs(nfs ver3, ver4 cause kernel panic under that load). Playback of one of the three streams while it is being recorded isn't do-able but recording two and watching an earlier(yet to be transcoded) one all at the same time works.

An hour of 1080i is a little shy of 8.5GB. The network link is the bottleneck in my setup, the disk array handles the task without a problem.

While I completely agree with your reasons for being upset, I'm afraid Linux has made a very bad Catch22 for all hardware vendors out there. If pcHDTV had released a proprietary driver there would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about "open source". pcHDTV went with incorporating support into the Video for Linux open source project and now is at the mercy of kernel interface changes, distros that release "patched" kernels that will no longer compile the drivers, an open source community that refactors their code about as often as they sneeze, etc. etc. ... As a vendor of hardware pcHDTV takes flack for every issue that belongs squarely at the feet of [the software it integrates with]. ... The difference is other vendors don't give a damn if your card doesn't work right under linux. A working windows driver doesn't need to be constantly refactored or tweaked but a working linux driver can't go a month without needing a modification somewhere; because someone else changed something.

I hesitate to quote this guy, because it's obvious he's responding to a frustrated user, and I don't want to get him in trouble, but I think the point he makes is an important one. Linux is widely perceived as a difficult platform not to develop on per se, but to maintain software on. Even with a company that's ideologically motivated to support Linux, working with the community can be very difficult.

There are a shortage of examples that you can really point to as models for Linux "open hardware" development. Before we can even think about making something as complex as a WLAN card, the basic issues at play here with pcHDTV need to be worked out. Nobody wants to develop hardware and promise to support it, for a platform that's constantly in flux. Users don't want to buy hardware that's not supported at least at a basic level with their chosen OS/distro. And so you have a chicken-and-egg problem.

"Open hardware" would definitely be a solution to the rapidly-closing world of commodity hardware, which promises to only cause more grief to alternative OSes in the future (barring some sort of governmental action, which seems unlikely); however, for th

Having started with Knoppmyth, and then moved briefly to Mythdora, I settled in on a manual compile of Myth 0.19 on Suse 10.1. It was this configuration that worked best for me - because I had invested in 2 PCHDTV HD-5500 tuners. I could not get them working in Myth 0.20 at all, and finally made them work in 0.19. The feature set between the two is minimal, with 0.20 being a lot of fixes and optimizations, so there's not a lot of love lost.

Myth is not an easy thing for even the experienced admin to make work. Because of the dependencies and the hardware involvement, this is more than just installing an application and having it work. For people new to the Myth infrastructure, it's actually rather nice to have a live CD install everything that's necessary. For 90% of the folks wanting to try it, they're going to have a dedicated PC for it anyway. Of course, if you want to just throw in a tuner card and try it that way, you can compile it too.

If you're a Suse person, you can check out a HOWTO I put together for 10.1 and PCHDTV cards here. It covers all the stuff one has to do to make a Myth box work with HD under Suse 10.1. While there are RPMs available for Myth 0.20 on Suse 10.1, the package doesn't support HD, which is what my project was specifically designed to be.

If you do plan on doing HD - be vigilant in your hardware selection! HD playback takes a considerable amount of computing horsepower. I really recommend getting an nVidia 5200 card for playback - not only are they super cheap, and sometimes fanless (read: noiseless), but they also support the nVidia XvMC playback driver, which accelerates MPEG2 streams, offloading decoding from your processor. It also does a fine job at Bob2X deinterlacing, required for watchable HD.

Any chance you want to list the set of hardware you were looking at?

I've been interested for a while in building a MythTV STB, but I've just been put off by the hardware issues. It seems like every video input card has some little niggling issue that might or might not make it work or break ... I understand that part of the "fun" is setting it up, but maybe I've just turned into an old fogey. I'm not going to buy hardware unless I'm sure it's going to work, and work well, with the software.

A while ago, I was all set to get a pcHDTV HD-5500 because it's allegedly built from the ground up to be Linux-compatible, but even it had issues and didn't "just work" in many applications. (I've read posts by the developer and they blame the constant changes by the MythTV team to the backend that breaks drivers and forces the manufacturer into a constant cat-and-mouse redevelopment game in order to keep Linux users happy.)

I want something that can do ATSC, Clear QAM, and NTSC Analog cable, so that I can plug it into my Comcast line and get all my current (unencrypted) analog channels, plus whatever they're broadcasting in the clear via QAM, and I'd like it to do ATSC in case I decide to ditch cable in the future. I haven't found any hardware that seems sure to do that.

I've said elsewhere that I think there's a market for someone to put together an 'Anti-Tivo,' basically a TiVO without any of its absurd DMCA-driven restrictions. Sure, it would technically be illegal, but no more so than any Linux PC that plays DVDs right now. (And no more so than a modded Playstation, and they sell them on Craigslist all the time.)

I'd love to have a Linux STB, but even for someone who isn't a Linux noob, the field is very confusing and full of "works, sorta" products.

If you're concerned at the difficulty of setting up MythTV try KnoppMyth. It's a one CD distro designed to make installing MythTV trivial. It has its problems, but its getting better. As for costs, I don't think TiVo offers a lifetime subscription anymore so that's irrelevant. TiVo can be obtained for little or no cost albeit with an agreement to sign up for a monthly subscription. MythTVs guide is free (for the time being at least). As for computer hardware requirements, it doesn't take much. About the only specialized and somewhat expensive piece of equipment you need is a TV tuner card. HD ones made for Linux can be obtained http://www.pchdtv.com/here.

I've wondered if maybe some Linux User's Group wanted to do this as a fund-raiser: do a bulk-purchase of some Linux-compatible peripheral (say a WL card or TV tuner) in OEM packaging, and then wrap it up with the appropriate drivers and sell it over the web at a 50-60% markup.

In case you haven't heard, there is a HDTV tuner card made specifically for linux, to receive Over-The-Air hdtv broadcasts, and analogue cable channels. I believe that as of kernel 2.6.12, driver modules are included with the kernel. Find or start your own LUG, and there you go. :-)

http://pchdtv.com/

Linux already plays HD content. I have proof in my living room today.

See http://mythtv.org/ and http://www.pchdtv.com/

Enjoy! I can do soooo much more with my myth box than a cable or sattelite provided pvr. I can store to DVD, I can watch from multiple networked locations, etc.

pcHDTV - http://www.pchdtv.com/

----
The HD-2000 was a 5v PCI card with two RF inputs and mono sound for NTSC. The HD-3000 is a similar card with one RF input, one SVIDEO input, one COMPOSITE VIDEO and AUDIO input and one audo stereo output for NTSC but the HD-3000 also supports Cable/QAM. Neithor card detects the broadcast
----

Intel is pushing a technology called Treacherous Computing, which will prevent unsigned code from running on their hardware. So even if you have the source code, if you try to remove the DRM restrictions, the hardware will refuse to run the modified binary.

The Free Software Foundation admits that the anti-DRM provisions in the GPLv3 will not be enough on their own to prevent the nightmare scenario where users can't trust their own computers.

People who understand the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management at a technical level (ie.Free and Open Source software developers) should warn the general public to avoid buying DRM-crippled hardware. Consumers should know about the great variety of DRM-free computers and accessories built specifically to work with Linux, the KDE desktop, and other Free and Open Source applications.

On the music side, there are plenty of websites that legally sell DRM-free, RIAA-free music by independent artists. Consumers can use an iTunes-like application called Songbird to easily download songs from these sites.

As for movies, building a Linux media center works better than the DRM-crippled offering from M$FT. Just download MythTV and run it on a computer equipped with the pcHDTV HD-3000 card and the PVR-350 card -- these will capture both standard definition (NTSC) and Digital/Hi-Definition (ATSC/HDTV) signals.

High Def, huh? That's cool, but all you've gotta do for a high-def DVR is get the hd-3000 card (http://www.pchdtv.com/) , with Linux compatibility pretty much off the box and a special vendor build of xine supplied that's compatible with high def, and then build a mythtv box & you are good to go.

http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/album_page.php?pic _id=11
http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/album_page.php?pic _id=10


Easy as pie (well, not really, but if you use something like knoppmyth from http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html in your dedicated box, or follow Jarod's Howto for Fedora on http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ , it isn't too difficult.)

Intel is pushing a technology called Treacherous Computing, which will prevent unsigned code from running on their hardware. So even if you have the source code, if you try to remove the DRM restrictions, the hardware will refuse to run the modified binary.

The Free Software Foundation admits that the anti-DRM provisions in the GPLv3 will not be enough on their own to prevent the nightmare scenario where users can't trust their own computers.

People who understand the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management at a technical level (ie.Free and Open Source software developers) should warn the general public to avoid buying DRM-crippled hardware. Consumers should know about the great variety of DRM-free computers and accessories built specifically to work with Linux, the KDE desktop, and other Free and Open Source applications.

On the music side, there are plenty of websites that legally sell DRM-free, RIAA-free music by independent artists. Consumers can use a cross-platform, iTunes-like application called Songbird to easily download songs from these sites.

As for movies, building a Linux media center works just as well as the DRM-crippled offering from M$FT. Just download MythTV and run it on a computer equipped with the pcHDTV HD-3000 card and the PVR-350 card -- these will capture both standard definition (NTSC) and Digital/Hi-Definition (ATSC/HDTV) signals.

I forgot to meniton the book Linux Multimedia Hacks. In chapter 4 it mentions building a Digital Video Recorder (DVR). I have a copy of the book but haven't read it yet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF) also has a page about building your own PVR for HDTV. I don't know if you are iterested in recording HDTV with a PVR but, if so, pcHDTV is one of the two only companies that makes a Linux HDTV video capture card. But, I am not sure if an HDTV video capture card is actually something you would want or not.

I've played around a few times with building a Mythbox for this sort of thing. The two things stopping me are mainly that I can't decide on a capture card and finding a usable remote that's not insanely overpriced (Preferably USB. I don't want to have to solder up a serial IR receiver or whatever LIRC needed the last time I looked). Any suggestions? I don't care about HD content or any of that crap, just basic cable input, which the HD-3000 I looked at for "futureproofing" doesn't seem able to handle (or at least, that's what the FAQ suggests.. I think.).

The other option I've been playing with is getting an Xbox and modding it with XMC.No TV capture, but that's really just gravy at this point (not much good on TV these days, and nothing worth watching on "broadcast"). Of course, then the question becomes which mod chip to get. :)

So this of course is why I'm still without either. ;)

There is a Hauppauge card that supports clear QAM as well as the Linux only pcHDTV card (with support right in MythTV).

I'm confused. Are you saying the card you are running does not support clear QAM or that ESPN-HD is encrypted?

...can't wait to try to find a HDTV tuner with hardware based encoding that also works under Linux...

You joking?

Seriously?

Not only do a lot of HDTVs come with an HDTV tuner (mine did and I bought it two years ago), you can buy a frickin' card for linux or if you have an HDTV without a tuner, you an buy one of these or another of the many like it.

Sheesh!

I went through this same process when putting together a system for my MythTV box.

MythTV allows for your frontent (display system) to be seperate from your backend (receiver cards, storage, transcoding - commercial removal, etc.). So you can make a big, cheap, powerful, loud system to do all the heavy lifting, and make a scaled down front-end as quiet as possible.

But, if you need to put them all in one box, you should consider power/heat in all components. Here are the main points in mine:

- Athlon64 CPU. Lower power requirements in general, and Cool 'n Quiet feature to slow down the processor, make it much better than Intels.
- Large Heat Sink + Fan. A large copper Zalman HSF runs very quiet. In my system, with cool 'n quiet enabled, the fan actually turns off most of the time it's not doing heavy lifting.
- Good case, designed for quiet operation. The Antec Sonata has a fairly quiet power supply (the newer unit has the single large fan on the underside of the PSU), and a large case fan. The large fans run slower/quieter and still push a lot of air.
- Quiet HDD. I prefer Seagate Barracuda. This used to be hard to find, but now it seems most HDD manufacturers are making quiet drives with fluid bearings. The Antec case has rubber connectors where the HDD attaches to cut down on vibration noise. If you can use network file storage, using a 2.5" drive will cut down even more on power/noise/heat/vibration and size issues. (Taking it even further, some people use a flash based system, or network boot, to eliminate spinning disks completely).
- Fanless Video Card. The Nvidia FX5200 can be found fanless from many places. It supports MPEG2 acceleration in Linux (XvMC) and works well with MythTV.

Throw a Hauppage PVR-500 Dual SD tuner card in there, with a couple HD3000 cards from http://www.pchdtv.com/ and you've got a great MythTV PVR.

MythTV running on pcHDTV-3000 and are a killer combination for viewing and recording HDTV on Linux. Even unencrypted QAM is supported.

The pcHDTV forum is very informative if you want to set up your own PVR on Linux.