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HDTV Reception Now Available on Linux
-tji writes "A new company, www.pchdtv.com, has just released the first digital TV receiver card for Linux. Along with the Linux drivers, they have also modified xine to support HD playback and add XvMC support for MPEG2 hardware acceleration with some video cards. This has great potential for integration into PVR apps, like freevo and mythtv. There is also another project to reverse engineer drivers for the Teralogic TL880 based DTV cards. The one active developer has done a great job, but could use some help."
According to their website they distribute with the card the sources for the V4L driver and the modified version of xine they talk about. Although they do talk about optionaly using NVidia cards to accelerate things, so they may encourage the use of NVidia's binary drivers. But either way, those are optional optimizations so...
Looks like a very nice card... If I had HDTV service I'd definately think about buying one.
This is the first card specifically for HDTV, but:
For a while now, DVB cards have been available with software for Linux that have been able to recieve and process HDTV satalite signals. The 'other' PVR app that doesn't seem to catch on in the US is VDR, located at http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr This is a full featured, open source PVR application that does work with DVB cards to show HDTV.
1. Users will continually update drivers and eventually absorb them into vareous Linux projects taking support off your hands permenently.
2. Free advertsing on Freshmeat as your drivers are announced then again as projects absorb your drivers.
3. Free adveritsing on Slashdot.
4. Slimmer marketshare means greater sales amoung Linux users.
Reasons to NOT provide offical Linux drivers
1. If your suffering on the Windows side a quick throw in to support Linux will not save you.
2. It'll piss off Microsoft.
3. Your website will be slashdotted.
4. There is a lose lose factor on your drivers. If your drivers are too good users may not improve them if they suck to much users won't buy your product.
Your best bet is to always supply unoffical drivers directly into open source projects so that users will always look to the open source projects for support and not you while at the same time the open source projects give you free advertsing and they get slashdotted not you.
I don't actually exist.
I'm a core Freevo developer and I have something to say:
Recently we won an Epia and Hauppage PVR-250 and they will be better supported than others, just because we can test it.
If you like the idea and want to be supported, contact us via developers list (freevo: freevo-devel@lists.sourceforge.net)
Thanks, GustavoI have one of these and it is basically as
advertised. I use it to capture streams on Linux,
though I still play them back on my Windows-based
card which has component video support.
However, the xine patches work OK.
It is still a hacker's delight, though, and will
continue to be until all of the modifications
make it into the xine and v4l trees; and into at
least the Debian Unstable package system. The
software works, but takes some effort to get
installed and running.
I am quite satisfied with my purchase!!! Everyone
who supports Linux should buy one, if only to
support the business model.
Mark
Pre-orders have begun for the pcHDTV HD-2000 card and the cards will start to ship this week. Several lucky people who have contacted me (or pcHDTV) already have the card and have been enjoying HDTV on Linux. My part is HDTV/Linux that I have been working on support for the card in MythTV for the last month, but due to my very busy schedule all features are not complete (seeking and handling low HDTV signals). I invite anyone who is interested in HDTV and MythTV to come by #mythtv on the freenode irc network and talk with me (bbeattie). The largest problem right now is obtaining a HDTV program schedule as xmltv does not provide this.
Also, I have written a Linux HTPC how-to that talks about the card and other Linux HTPC like issues at www.sllug.org/how-to/linux-htpc/introduction.html . It will be very useful for anyone wanting to do HDTV or HTPC like features with Linux.