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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."
Now if we get support for the HDTV outputs on the Radeon 9800, I will have the perfect DVR to go with my 61" HDTV!
/.ing...
Site's already slow....
Probably won't survive the
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
This is really interesting- I know I'll be buying one within a year or two, to go along with my wonderful new LCD screens and system. Linux-compatible from the ground up. Got RH 9 on it right now (Mandrake choked on it last time for some odd reason- never did figure that out)
...and mucho more HD space...no, not for pr0n, but for timeshifting the shows...let's see you beat that, RIAA. *Wonders if a lawsuit could ensue for people trying to timeshift, but not being able to...hmmmm....*
/. *Sigh*.
Now...just to find a cheap big lcd screen...
On a side note, out of 14 posts (when I first viewed page) only 1 was actually relevant. The sad status of
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I tell you, it's darn difficult watching things in standard definition once you've gotten used to Jennifer Gartner on Alias in her glorious 1920 by 1080 pixels with a full color gamut.
;-)
Timeshifting her is the hard part. For that, I've resorted to the MyHD card with its Windows drivers sitting on a system with an IDE-based RAID array. Yes, it works. But it's Windows. Need I say more to a Slashdot crowd?
http://www.pchdtv.com/faq.php#faq0000007
Isn't that a bit low for the average piece of hardware in a PC? I bought an ancient (used) ISA sound card for an even more ancient PC and I still got 180 days of warranty for it...
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I've read a lot here about the possible recording limitations. Does this (slashdotted) company mean no more timeshifting problems?
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
If we want many of the commercial software companies to take Linux seriously, we have to convey the message that we find it acceptable to pay for some software that will run in Linux.
I'm willing to pay for software, just not when it's proprietary. I'll only play for Free Software.
Do any cards exist that can decode digital cable tv without having to go through the digital cable tv box? I'm not looking to get channels I'm not paying for. I just want a PVR that can act like my VCR did when I had analog cable. I used to be able to easily record shows on different channels. Tivo solves the problem by changing the channel on the Digital Cable TV box which isn't the optimal solution and prevents me from watching one show and recording another.
Just because they would deliver the source code with their product doesn't make it "Free", unless they specifically relinquish redistribution rights to the user of the software. That may or may not fit within their business model and is their choice to make. However, depriving the user of the source code is to maintain control over the user.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
This is pretty neat, but it appears to fall short of being able to just capture the ATSC stream and play it back unmodified to the TV.
Not everyone needs mad power hardware or cards to decode the MPEG2 stream and output it. Some HD tuners, like those included in the Mitsubishi HD sets, have FireWire jacks that are capable of feeding the transport stream to something (typically a D-VHS deck) and accepting a transport stream back from a device.
Apple has released a sample application with their FireWire SDK for MacOS X called VirtualDVHS that I've been playing with. My notes on it are here. The FireWire enabled tuner does all the work, including sending start/stop commands to the device, and on Mits sets, timer recordings.
It's a great little program, and since it's a SDK, you get all the source code for it and the FireWire drivers. The TV's remote control works (commands sent via the FireWire interface) and here's the best part: it works on a dead slow stock CPU G3 266. This computer can't even play simple QuickTime movies properly, yet it works like a charm because all it does is capture and stream back the MPEG2 transport stream. The tuner's decoder does all the hard work.
Okay, so it isn't a PVR with nifty features and whatnot, nor will it work if you don't have a tuner with FireWire jacks. But I don't care too much about the PVR features for the moment because there isn't enough OTA HD programming yet. All I need it to do is time shift a few programs each week when I'll have to be at work, or busy with school, or whatnot.
VirtualDVHS may be a ghetto program, but it gives you a glimpse of what you can do with MPEG2 streams. No special ATSC cards required. And hey, you get the source: make it do more of what you want and tell people about it, or write your own.
this is my sig
I did the support for MythTV for this card. I had to buy the card, and I also know the person who owns pcHDTV. Getting the card to work is fairly easy. The card uses a patched bttv driver (currently but this will be changing) and only requires a different ioctly set for the video mode. You then just stream mpeg2-ts from /dev/dtv. The main problem is if your video player (ie mplayer in freevo's case) correctly supports mpeg2-ts, which it doesn't do fully changing sub channels. This is a mplayer, not freevo issue though. And support can be done without the card even. :) Come talk to me, bbeattie on the freenode network if you have any questions though.
Hello, I'm the developer of that TL880 driver linked to in the story. It would be really nice if everyone who owns such a card (MyHD, HiPix, WinTV-HD, AccessDTV) came on over and subscribed to the mailing list, and played with some of the software for a few minutes. The latest effort is to map the card's registers. A preliminary map that has nearly every register listed, but only detailed descriptions for enough registers to get the card displaying color bars, is located here. Also, as -tji mentioned in another post, ATI's set top box division is unwilling to provide any help to anyone not buying a minimum $25000 annual volume. So, if everyone who owns such a card could e-mail their card's manufacturer (i.e. Hauppauge, Telemann, MIT), as suggested on the How To Help page, asking them to try to arrange for help with the I2C-connected chips on the card, it would be great.
Thanks.
As for the PCHDTV, I just ordered an upgrade for my sytem from an Athlon XP1800+ to 2600+ with 333MHz FSB, and a Geforce FX 5200 for motion compensation, and I'll probably be ordering the PCHDTV soon. The useful parts of the code for the TL880 driver are the Oren VSB demodulator interface and the modified tuner.c which includes support for the dual input Philips NTSC/ATSC tuner. It's really annoying that the tuner and msp3400 modules in the kernel only attach to bttv drivers, rather than providing a generic interface that any new driver can hook to.
A solution to the problem with music today