Slashdot Mirror
Plextor PVRs Now Support Linux
planetjay writes "Plextor
PVRs now support Linux with an open source SDK for their ConvertX
PVR external USB TV tuner/encoder
This is great news for Linux PVR users who want to use an external
device with hardware based MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/DivX encoding in their MythTV or Freevo homebuilt PVR.
"Plextor is strongly committed to supporting the Open Source Software
movement with free development tools that help speed the creation of
next-generation Linux-based video software," said Dirk Peters,
director of marketing, Plextor."
I keep loving seeing these companies lately who are Doing The Right Thing (tm). Here's to hoping clue is contagious.
I've been having trouble choosing a nice hardware MPEG encoder. Any reccomendations on ones that worked well for you?
wow, now i actually might go buy the necessary equipment and start using my linux box as a pvr
What's nice about this to me is that, since it's USB2 (tech specs aside), you
can take the space that a pci card would have, put a usb2 card in it's place,
and have multiple tuners, since mythtv has support for multiple tuners, case
space considerations are no longer such a factor.
Now, we just have to see if it's any good.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
If it can do that.....I'll buy it.
I'm gonna build a mythtv box to record hdtv and satalite... what hardware should I buy to build one of these bad boys?
The sad thing is that the built-in tv-tuner only supports NTSC, so this product is obviously not targeted for europe...
Open Materials Database
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all Tivos already Linux-based? And didn't they just recently come out with an SDK for third-party users?
...or is there no easy way to BYOPVR? I mean, I've heard about MythTV and Freevo and all sorts of hardware, etc, and as much as I think Linux can be a great tool, sometimes it's a royal FPITA to get thing configured & compiled right, make everything work. I'm not a kung-fu master sysadmin, just a guy who's done his fair share of ./configure, make && make install.
If I don't want to fuck around with making sure I've got all the right hardware pieces just perfect, what're my options for buying something pre-built that will work well, no monthly subscription fee, etc?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Too bad none of the HDtv cards out there can decrypt signals from Satellite or cable. Of course thats due to the providers forcing you to buy/rent their own PVRs.
I'd be all over this device if it would work with an HD feed from satellite.
Article title got it right, link got it wrong. Incidentally, this exact same error is on a billboard outside my house -- there's a sports star prominently featured, with the text "MVP's [whatever-his-name-is] and Dahill Industries".
/. editors to do any better?
I suppose that if folks who are paying tens of thousands of dollars for billboard space can't get it right, why should I expect
I actually own the ConvertX PVR from plextor. It's very nice actually and I would recommend it to anyone. It's now time to hookup a linux box PVR system, hazah!
Want to learn about anything sexual? Check out the sex wiki:
ANYTHING will support Linux if you try hard enough!
I, for one welcome our new Plextor Overlords...
"Of course thats due to the providers forcing you to buy/rent their own PVRs."
Oh really? And here I thought it was because of all the "Your signal passed through my body, so it's mine to enjoy without paying" people?
I submitted this to slashdot about 2 weeks ago. Amazing
Maybe you can help the guy over on alt.os.linux.suse get his working.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but mythtv does not currently have support for this device does it? Or can it be used as a generic v4l device?
I've been using Windows Media Center edition and I'm going to drop it. First off, it's unstable, having to reboot your TV once or twice a week isn't fun especially when if you don't do it you come home to find it missed your shows. Second, the DRM is really a pain in the neck. MS-DVR isn't hard to convert to a better format but it is time consuming because there's always that extra step of making it into mpeg-2. Saving a show off windows media center is actually harder than ripping a CSS encrypted DVD. (I hate to do the typical MS-bashing but I really have been having a lot of trouble with my media center recently.)
I have been planning on buying one of the plextor units for a while, I like the idea of hardware encoding directly to mpeg-4, and I like plextor products, the have made the most reliable CD burners I've ever owned. I like the linux option, that seems like a good idea, but whatever I do I simply want it to be as versatile as possible, and Windows MCE is not versatile.
Now this is class, not only are they the first company to release drivers this kind of product for linux, they way they are doing it is truely awesome.
Released under the GPL(this will probertly be included in the kernel pretty soon i guess?), V4L2 support and code samples.
I can hardly wait for gstreamer (and it's v4l2 source element) to get a bit more stable/functional, and stuff like gstsharp gets included in the mono stack. I imagine we'll start to see a hole bunch of neat video applications.
Plextor gets two thumbs up for this. Hauppauge gets thumbs down for not only not providing open source drivers for their PVR-x50 cards, but for not even supplying proprietary drivers. It's due to what can only be described as amazingly valient work on the part of the IVTV developers (and users) that Hauppauge's cards are usable on Linux systems.
...
Luckily for Hauppauge, there is currently nothing to worry about with the Plextor PVR having a MSRP of $199. But if that price ever comes down
http://www.plextor.be/products/px-tv402u.asp?choic e=ConvertX%20PVR%20PX-TV402U
It's way better to get a dedicated PVR such as a TiVo or ReplayTV. if you really want to you can watch them on the computer via a TV card with video input. You can also control them remotely with computer based IR blasters or via network commands. With multiple outputs you can even watch them on larger TV's at the same time. Also you will never miss a recording because the computer is doing something else!
Then there are advanced features such as streaming shows from a ReplayTV to another ReplayTV or to your computer. To save something just download and burn shows to your PC's DVD. There is a real nice program you can run on your PC/Linux box to manage multiple ReplayTV's as well! Using a searchable guide you can search for shows on your hi-res PC interface and then setup the recording's. Later you can fire up the PVR and watch them. To me this is the "ultimate way" to MANAGE and then WATCH TV! TiVo's advanced recording mechanism is also a nice feature for some people, how much time do you really want to spend hunting for interesting stuff to watch? Why not delegate that task to the computer?
I was about to buy some pvr cards now rather than later so I don't end up with cards with a broadcast flag prematurely enabled in the cards. Don't be so sure that the manufacturers will wait until the deadline to enable the broadcast flag. They may decide to enable the flag during scheduled downtime rather than wait until a date deadline when they may have no deadline (and orders for different hardware to be built on the same equipment).
What is important is to be able to discern whether this pvr hardware or any of the other pvr hardware has the broadcast flag enabled so you know which ones to avoid.
One of the things that worried me was the pvr pci cards themselves. I'm no expert on pci technology, so the concern is how long before the cards are obsolete? I have some older computers that use the old slot technology (ISA?), and those cards are now useless. Ended up having to buy new cards. From what I've read, the PCI Express slots are smaller and use serial technology, so they are incompatible with the current pci cards. And after PCI Express? PCI-X?
What happens to all the pci pvr cards when the motherboards start including PCI Express? They are already adding the slots. It looks like they are mixing the PCI Express with the regular PCI slots, similar to what they did with the old transition to PCI. The irony is that the pvr cards would benefit tremendously from PCI Express. I've been thinking of buying two over-the-air digital cards, one the air2pc and the other the 3000 card (can't remember the rest of the name right now) so that I spread my risks. I've also planned to buy two pvr-350s, for a total of 4 cards. I already am figuring that the limitation with recording from the 4 total cards simultaneously would be the pci bus (raid would eliminate the hard drive i/o bottleneck).
The reason for sticking 4 cards in one backend for mythtv would be to keep electricity costs reasonable. One of the things I've noticed that many people ignore is the cost of running a computer 24/7. This is the problem with multiple backends for mythtv (and seti@home). If one backend can be used for recording and playback, that keeps the electricity costs at a minimum. Add a second backend and electricity costs double.
I've been watching the mythtv user list recently, as well as the irc channels for mythtv and knoppmyth so I can figure out where is the best place to buy all of the cards, the air2pc, the 3000, the pvr-250/350. It looks like some places are out of stock on them from time to time. And pricewatch is no help. Being out of stock brings up the original worries, that the cards sell out as they are made without a large stockpile, which makes it more likely that the broadcast flag will appear in cards sooner than the deadline because of the reasons I outlined above and because there is no old stock to work off.
The card listed in this post would be better than the pci cards if the hardware has all the functionality of the pci cards. The reason being that the connection, usb, would be more likely to outlast pci slots which are being obsoleted by the pci express. As for whether the bandwidth of usb 2.0 is an issue over a pci slot, I can't speak to that. But it keeps the pvr hardware working when the motherboard/computer becomes obsolete and finally fails.
Thanks, Hollings, and the rest of the Senators for pushing for the broadcast flag. Hope you choke on your campaign contributions and honorariums.
A list of stores to purchase the pvr-250/350 and air2pc and 3000 cards would be greatly appreciated. More than one reliable source would be appreciated as well. And the ir blaster also.
Comments about bandwidth requirements on the pci bus would be welcome also. Thanks.
If plextor is so committed to open source why is it I have to take my plextor px-708 drive out of the computer and over to an f-ing ms-dos box to upgrade the firmware? They are just like the wifi companies -- they pay lip service to open source but don't release the details needed to load firmware onto the drive.
They donated one of these boxes to the myth creator, and perhaps even more to other developers. They are smart, they want to get to get widespread support out there for their product, and I will maybe add one of these to my next mythbox.
You can move your capture to your laptop or burn to dvd just by buying something that can accept SVideo in, and analog audio... That way you have the best of both worlds, amazing quality, then the slightly downgraded quality that's mobile.
Now that I'm on a HD cable DVR, I have to say (aside from the HD content) I miss my directivo.
this happens 7 days after I ordered a Hauppauge PVR-350. I'd rather spend my money on someone who actively supports Linux.
Oh well, that's life.
the parent is noise.
The drivers can be tricky to install, but once working, the display is faultless.
Check out this link to see one in action.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
S-Video in, analog capturing - amazing quality?
Slighly downgraded quality?
Get you eyes checked. Analog capturing, even wih a good card thru s-video, it's blatantly obvious that quality is MUCH lower - it doesn't even compare.
It is fairly easy to capture the MPEG2 stream from my Insight provided DVR/Cable Box. This even works with HDTV. It does not work with HBO, and I haven't tried PPV (doubt it).
I'm using an ibook G4, a firewire cable, and a free program called iRecord to capture the files. The captured file can be converted for DVD burning using MPEG Streamclip or other software.
The only downside is the amount of hard drive space used. Some HDTV channels are up to 17mbps. Regular channels are usually around 6mbps.
This support sounds very good. I want something that supports both Windows and Linux, so this might fit the bill.
When it says mpeg4 encoding what does it mean? I thought mp4 was just a container format?
I guess if I'm going to be encoding TV into mp4 then it would be good to find a video card with TV out and hardware mp4 decoder? Any suggestions?
I tried out MythTV, but, as you would have predicted, it indeed proved to be a FPITA. I also tried out Freevo, which was similarly painful.
/dev/video0. Use a utility to set the channel, then try cat'ing that to a file, and you'll get something you can play with mplayer:
/dev/video0 > someFile
/dev/video0. Which is what I did. The hard part is the programming.
However, what I found was that it was pretty darned easy to write my own pvr app. I use the Hauppauge PVR-250. I can't recall if I needed to install a driver -- seems to me the driver came with my Mandrake. On bootup, you get
$ ivtv-ptune.pl 10 # tune to channel 10
$ cat
^C
$ mplayer someFile
(the utility came from the IVTV package -- that's the driver I'm using for the Hauppauge).
So, as you can imagine, it's quite easy to write a little command-line app which just sits there snarfing stuff off
On that score, MythTV was pretty nice. It uses a MySQL database to store listings which it gets via a free web service provided by Data Direct (or ZapIt, or something like that -- I forgets the details..) You just need to run mythfilldatabase periodically, via cron.
Then, my little command-line app (which runs continuously in the background) reads the MySQL database, and my own control file, periodically, and refigures what it's going to program and in what order.
Not for everyone, I admit. But it was surprisingly easy for me to get it all working. And now, I have what _I_ consider to be The Ultimate PVR Which Does Exactly What I Want It To Do (except when it hits a bug, of course...)
That, to me, is the beauty of Linux!
The jack layout is similiar to that of the Pinnacle PCTV USB Deluxe. In many regards the PCTV is a total POS, with a high rate of failure. But when it works, the output is actually decent. There is indeed linux drivers, and they do work sometimes (kudos to the author of them). We used a few of them at Defcon to dump all of the video to disk. Upon looking at it, one of them dumped nothing but reptitive block of gibberish.
The PCTV USB uses the same chipset that the new Tivos do. That is, the Broadcom KFIR-II. The PCTV USB doesn't do MPEG4/DIVX (xvid for life, screw divx). They do MPEG2 and MPEG1. MPEG2 quality being good, MPEG1 not up to par with a good mpeg1 videocd encode job.
The Pinnacle unit *IS NOT MADE BY PINNACLE*. I wonder if the Plextor is made by the same company that originally made the Pinnacle unit? The jacks look similar in placement and configuration....
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
The encoder is the WIS G07007SB and the board is based on a WIS reference design with improvements made in-house by Plextor. Both the hardware and the Linux drivers are quite stable.
I tried using Pocket IE and Pocket media player on my iPaq. I couldn't get Shoutcast streams to play. Not with any combo of PocketPC SW. So I installed Familiar, and everything's groovy. It's amazing that MS SW can't get the horsepower out of HW designed to run it, but Linux can do the trick.
--
make install -not war
Nice USB.. But what about people who want to build this into their computer? What if we don't want an extra box taking up space?
Make this on a PCI card and I'll buy it over a happauge in a second.
What good are any of these hardware MPEG2 or MPEG4 cards? You can't edit these MPEG formats cleanly, and I certainly don't see any easy way to do it in Linux. Plus, what if I don't want MPEG2 or MPEG4? What if I want to archive video in a high quality format and then extract clips for my website in some other codec-du-jour like H.264 someday? You can't expect me to save off a crappy 2 mbit/sec MPEG4 as my "master footage"!
On Linux we have kino, which works with camcorder-style DV files. I can edit the video I want using kino and save off the new DV files without having to recompress surrounding frames. In other words, the only quality loss is in the initial encode, and with DV it's not *that* much quality loss. (DVCPRO 50 is better still)
So obviously DV files are the only easy and uber-quality way to do video on Linux (or any format for that matter) in a way that should just work. Then I can transcode later to MPEG2 when I want a DVD or MPEG4 for a website. Can any of these capture cards save video to DV format instead? Or, better yet, raw video?
It seems like the ultimate solution would be a card that lets me capture video to *any* format--including high quality raw or DV/DVCPRO 50 video. Then, if it has hardware MPEG2/4 encode/decode, that is nice as well, but it should be optional so I can use it at any time in the future, not just during initial capture. Give it library hooks to work with transcode or mencoder.
Does this thing come with a stereo PAL tuner? The spec sheets does not say, and neither does it say anything about text tv support, which is usually a big warning about a cheap mono tuner.
You may not be a geek. You are definitely a gadget guy. One does not necessarily equate to the other. I like to build things for the fun of building them. Even if the end result *MIGHT* not be as good as a pre-packaged product, I always get this let down/cop out feeling when I buy something I know I could have built. I also don't like it when I get a closed system of some kind and mods are nearly impossible. Of course, I don't realy consider myself a geek since most of the geeks I've interacted with on /. have never: built their own memory expansion for their computers, built their own digital devices for regular use (in my case I built a MIDI interface and a digital volume control)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
See my sig.
I forsee the day when TiVo is nothing more than a program listing provider to many brands of PVR that contain a TiVo plug-in.
Of course, I've also thought Apple should be an operating system provider to the most common hardware platform(s).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Unless I'm missing something, you can totally port GPL'ed code to other platforms. You just have to distribute the source if you distribute binaries (or a platform with the binaries embedded)
pros - records HDTV; can stream these out to my computer via firewire
cons - always viewing captured video, even live TV, thus, degraded quality over my previous digital tuner
a few bugs; freezes, resets.
2. Tivo - good menus user friendly; seemed to have the best quality captures from the digital tuner; polished; uses remote control
3. Sage TV w/ Plextor PVR (On Win2003 AS).
Stable; can store shows on DVD easily; they play on my panasonic dvd player. Can access recorded video on laptops all over the house. Uses Freeboard wireless keyboard (could get remote);
So what, in the flying fornication is up with HDTV availability? Is it that hard to ask for anything higher than 480i on a reasonably-priced TV? Is there no way to get 1080i, or even 480p on a VGA or DVI monitor?
I can't understand why, in this supposedly "modern" age, there's no plethora of HDTV-capable devices for a reasonable price. Is it that hard to offer these devices, considering standard 640x480 has been a thing of a past for awhile now?
My question is whether or not they also have support for Mac OS X. This device could be a godsend for someone setting up a Mac Mini as an HTPC. There have been numerous questions and doubts about the Mini's computational prowess (founded or otherwise, I'm not debating that here), and something like this that can encode DivX on the fly and just throw it to the computer through USB2.0 would be great for the Mini. Anybody have any info on this?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I was taught in grade school to use the apostrophe to pluralize numbers and letters. So that's the way that looks right to me.
...in Helvetica)
The point of punctuation is to disambiguate.
What's more clear:
"I wish As and Us were more clear"
-or
'I wish A's and U's were more clear"
(e.g.
As and Us are both words. Coming in without context you'd have no clue these were plural forms. I've been confused by these on store titles in my RSS reader, for instance.
Any valid acronym rule also needs to acknowledge the existence of mixed-case acronyms.
For example:
"A packet may match many rules defining QoSs at the switch"
"A packet may match many rules defining QoS's at the switch"
Without a-priori knowledge the reader doesn't know where the acronym stops and the pluralization begins. The apostrophe disambiguates that.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes, this is an error, no matter how often it's made :)
It was an oversight - literally - on my part; I corrected the error in the headline as submitted, but the small monitor I was reading on at the time made it hard to see (and I missed) the one in the story text, or I would have changed it when setting up the story. Now fixed.
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
perusing the site, it seems like this SlashSnippet is news for nerds, news that only matters if you live in North America.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think