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Linux Looms Large in DVRs, PVRs

Posted by timothy on from the no-pesky-license-fees dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at LinuxDevices there's a new fanless digital entertainment center reference design based on Linux and the MythTV open source DVR (digital video recorder) software. The 'Royal Linux Media Center' runs ESG's Royal Linux OS on a Transmeta development board based on its Efficeon chip. Linux has been increasingly popular in DVRs and PVRs, with examples including TiVo (of course), HP's recently unveiled Linux media hub, i3's Mood box, Interact-TV's Telly, Siemens' Speedstream, VWB's MediaReady 4000, Amino's AmiNet500, Sharp's Galileo, Dream-Multimedia-Tv's Dreambox, NEC's AX10, and Sony's CoCoon, to name a few."

2 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Neat, but in violation of patent laws.. ie illegal by oblique303 · · Score: 5, Informative
    This reference design is neat, but any commercial implementation would be in violation of international patent law.

    MythTV currently relies on libavcodec on the backend to do video compression/decompression. The libavcodec library implements the various MPEG compression algorithms, which are *very* vigerously protected by the LA MPEG patent pool group.

    Any commercial implementation of a DVR using MythTV would be at extreme risk of prosecution by the LA MPEG group for unauthorized usage of the MPEG patents.

    It would be very nice to see MythTV transitioned to use the Theora (www.theora.org) video codec, as this is a patent-free video compression / decompression library.

  2. Re:Neat, but in violation of patent laws.. ie ille by dtperik · · Score: 5, Informative
    MythTV currently relies on libavcodec on the backend to do video compression/decompression.
    Unless you use a card that does encoding/decoding in hardware, no? Then MythTV is just dumping the MPEG data stream back and forth from the HD. Like the system I'm building using the Hauppage PVR-350.