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."

Comments

kill -9

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no greater pleasure in life than being able to

kill -9 JerrySpringer

when those irritating twats show up every morning.

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Elm Tree]

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.

cool

[wolrahnaes]

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!

Site's already slow....
Probably won't survive the /.ing...

Re:cool

[i_am_nitrogen]

HDTV uses a 4:2:0 color sampling, which means that the luminance channel is 1920x1080, and the two chrominance channels are 960x540. So, it's not 24 bits per pixel. It's more like 16. You might be able to squeeze it over a PCI bus, but an AGP video card ought to be able to do it on a fast enough system (2.4Ghz P4 or XP2600+ probably).

Since NVidia's binary drivers have support for motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform, the processor has less work to do, and can offload work to the video card. Since the data can be sent over the AGP bus, it should be possible to get full speed HDTV decoding.

Outstanding!

[YetAnotherName]

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? ;-)

Re:Outstanding!

[steve_bryan]

Since Alias is on ABC doesn't that make it 1280 x 720? Still plenty of Garner pixels but they are all honest progressively scanned pixels. What may surprise many is how good even 480i and 480p programming is compared to NTSC. The local FOX affiliate was showing episodes of Fastlane in upconverted 720p widescreen (presumably from 480p source) and the picture was amazing (not as good as real 720p or 1080i if you did a screen capture, but still remarkable).

If you enjoy any program on OTA (over the air) TV this sort of product will enhance it immensely. I don't know for sure that this board supports it (the site is properly slashdotted) but the other significant enhancement is 5.1 surround sound. Let's not forget the other advantage is that the programming involves no monthly bill and with the right software it can be recorded to your hard disk (about 9 gig per hour).

Great news

[tzanger]

But does anyone know what the status of v4l is in the 2.6 series? I went from 2.4.21 to 2.6.0-test3 (and now test4) as the HPT370 controller is iffy on Linux with APIC (this is an Epox EP-D3VA)... 2.6.0 completely solved all the APIC and SMP issues, but now V4L's not quite there. :-)

Ahh, the bleeding edge...

Well, not quite the first....

[edwardd]

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.

Re:Yay

[blue_collar_man]

So many toys, so little money.

I suppose I could go without food for a few days. =-)

Re:Drivers

[toddestan]

Not every company is willing to open source all their software and make it free. 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.

Until then, they will continue to develop only for OSes like Windows and MacOS.

90 day warranty?

[Torp]

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...

Reasons to make offical Linux drivers

[Felinoid]

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.

Re:Reasons to make offical Linux drivers

[Nucleon500]

Of course, the most important thing is completely open standards, without which any third party drivers are bound to suck, if they work at all. And why not, anyway? I've heard two reasons.

First, for "Win-" hardware, like controllerless modems and printers, companies are afraid if their driver was open-source, it would be simple for their competitors to use, reducing their software development costs. Two solutions: one, the company could GPL it, so at least they'd get any improvements. Or (more likely), someone should make a GPL driver core, which could be attached to similar dumb hardware, even of different brands. Then, with open specs, it would be easy to bind the hardware to the core to the kernel, and the company may even find it cheaper to adapt the open version for all OSs. (Aside: would Microsoft sign drivers with GPL cores?)

The other problem is that companies fear open-source drivers won't honor the evil bit, for example, WiFi cards with hacked drivers operating on forbidden frequencies, or video cards not honoring MacroVision signals. For starters, it's almost as easy to hack binary drivers, so it's no protection. Another solution is to make the hardware only accept register sets signed by the manufacturer's private key. This was proposed for WiFi cards, is better protection anyway, and can be used by open-source projects.

Not the first

[mocm]

There have been digital TV cards with open source Linux support for years. This may be the first card for the ATSC standard and doesn't even have an MPEG decoder, or why would the need xine.
Do they support the Linux DVB API, or at least the parts that are common in ATSC and DVB?
Are the drivers open source?

For more information on linux and digital TV see
LinuxTV
Metzlerbros
and links on those sites.

Re:Drivers

[justsomebody]

I find that very acceptable. But you made a magic mistake.

driver!=software

I for one write just as OSS as proprietary (both for Linux). The only real need in being open is to be open to correct extent.

If drivers are proprietary and company goes to drain, your hardware goes with company too. Just look at older TV Tuners under XP. No drivers no fun. But if drivers are made as OSS someone might continue to support your hardware even then.

As far as I was talking about sotware needing to be open to the correct extent. Take two this as example.
Accounting software >> can be proprietary, the only thing that must be open are correctly documented tables and their relations.
Software for editing some type of file >> Make a complete specification of document type.

There are points that company must revise.
1. What will happen if they go down with their customers, I was there and to tell you the truth as a customer I didn't liked it. That's why I had to drag one machine running Win3.1 until a year ago, It was the only possibility to access documents that were made.
2. Let's take something more simple now. You're the one man band and you're administering servers on companies. You die in a car crash. Do customers have to break in to continue to work. Or would it be more simple to use an envelope, write password in and protect it to be used just in case.

As far as paying, my customers were paying me when I was making Win software, and they are paying me now. Where's the difference?

Maybe they can provide us (developers) some HW?

[k-s]

Hello,

I'm a core Freevo developer and I have something to say:

Hardware makers: PLEASE SEND YOUR PRODUCTS TO PROJECTS DEVELOPERS! We don't have money/machine to buy every HW on the earth, so if you want to be supported, please provide at least one board to the project!

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, Gustavo

From the FAQ page:

[justinstreufert]

Is there a windows version of the drivers?
Not at this time.

GOD, that's nice to see for once!!
Justin

Digital Cable Card

[TornSheetMetal]

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.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[adpowers]

Because he wants Digital Cable, not DirecTV.

I looked around the DirecTV website and din't find a digital video recorder that supports HDTV.

If you did get a Tivo one, you are limited by what they let you do. They can remove 30 second skip at well or make you watch advertisements. Stuff like MythTV has lots of features with no advertisements and it doesn't track what you record (and send it to some master database at HQ). Plus, MythTV-like programs allow you to do a bunch of other stuff like play ROMs, DVDs, look at your pictures of the network, listen to mp3s, check your weather, etc.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[PatJensen]

Here's a solution for you.

Don't use the IR blaster on your TiVo. Upgrade to a Series 2 standalone with OS 4.0 and use a serial cable to connect your digital cable box. This gets rid of the slow channel change delays and pop-ups that come up when you change channels.

Despite what some say, you have to have a Series 2 to use serial channel change support. There is a port on Series 1, but it won't work - and you will just be sending IR without a blaster.

If you are on Comcast/AT&T, quite a few of the Motorola boxes support serial with the latest firmware. Check out the TiVo forum on AVS (www.avsforum.com) for more information.

Pat

My review of the card

[pyite69]

I 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

pcHDTV card

[brandon]

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.

YESSSSS!

[flacco]

I'm going to buy one for this FAQ entry alone:

Is there a windows version of the drivers?
Not at this time.

TL880-based Card Driver

[i_am_nitrogen]

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.