Linux Looms Large in DVRs, PVRs

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."

Comments

Can any of these

[testing124]

Play WMV9 ?

Neat, but in violation of patent laws.. ie illegal

[oblique303]

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.

Re:and still no ATI AIW support

[MBCook]

Blame ATI. Hauppage supports Linux. I don't know if they write the drivers, or if they just tell people what they need to know, but the drivers are there.

Your beef is with ATI. I have an All-In-Wonder 3D Pro AGP 8mb card. This is from when AGP was first introduced. Pentium II era. There is STILL no decent TV input support that I could even find under Linux. It was a ton of hacking and messing around with beta/cvs drivers the last time I looked (a few months ago). If ATI would make the drivers so you could use your card, things would be fine. They make bianary closed source drivers so you can use 3D, why can't they do it for TV input too? Ask 'em, I'd like to know the answer. They also refuse to tell people what they need to know to make the apropriate video capture drivers, let alone 3D and such.

The solution? Buy video capture stuff from Hauppage, or anyone else who supports Linux. Buy 3D stuff from nVidia (who at least gives great 3D support for all their cards) or someone else who supports their cards well under Linux (Matrox has good Linux drivers, don't they?).

In short: DON'T BUY ATI FOR LINUX USE. It's that simple.

Re:Neat, but in violation of patent laws.. ie ille

[dtperik]

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.