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."

Comments

Awesome

[SealBeater]

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

Re:Awesome

[lakeland]

Yeah, I have it working. I downloaded a patch to ivtv from somewhere (first hit on google) and it works. Too soon to say if it is stable, because I've only just put it in (to replace a cx88 based tuner).

Re:Awesome

[Sketch]

> Or just buy a card with multiple tuners. My pvr500 has two, but I've heard of cards with four!

But does your Myth box have enough CPU power to simultaneously record/encode 4 MPEG4/DivX streams? As far as I know, the Hauppage cards only do MPEG2 which is going to require much more disk space. The Plextor devices encode to MPEG4/DivX in hardware, so you should be able to handle a lot more tuners on one lower-spec box.

However, USB I/O is rather CPU intensive from what I've seen. I wonder how many you could actually hook up and use simultaneously.

Skip Commercials?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it can do that.....I'll buy it.

What's the easiest?

[Kozz]

...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?

Re:What's the easiest?

[lakeland]

There are some companies that will sell you a fine box 100% set up with mythtv for you. To pick one I like, solarpc.com. But if you want to sacrifice an existing box, then have a look at KnoppMyth, which will make installation almost as simple as putting the CD in the drive and hitting install.

Wishful thinking

[hashts]

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.

Re:gee

[Nik13]

Well, most HDTV sat programming (in NA) went to secure encryption (nagravision 2) not long ago, so you can't record it (unecnrypted) as easily as before.

Decrypting actually isn't so CPU intensive. I used to record/decrypt HD off sat (DVB) easily with a lowly Athlon XP 2000+, and cpu load was rather low. I think memory speed/latency and such might be more of a concern. (AFAIK, some cards can also do the decrypting itself in hardware, you just send it the proper keys)

As for decoding, you don't need so much speed either. Your video card (well, good ones at least) have some mpeg2 decoding acceleration. Sames goes for some OTA HDTV tuner cards. With a 3GHz PC and a good video card, you can playback 1080i stuff off satellite as is more than easily. (Actually, I can play 1080i easily on a 2GHz PC with a so-so video card in VLC without any problems). At OTA HDTV bitrates it might be a bit more problematic (haven't tried, no feeds available here). 1080p contents in WMV9 (kind of mpeg4 almost sorta ;) - even with DRM) should play fine with a 3GHz CPU supposedly, and mpeg4 usually more cpu intensive than mpeg2 (at same resolution/bitrate).

With optimized DVB software, fast video card drivers (not necessarily the latest version, some break mpeg2 decoding acceleration), recent video card, using a fast mpeg2 decoder with right settings, using a custom filtergraph worked fine on a 3GHz PC (decrypt/decode/watch real-time, usually mpeg2 @ 13mbit 720p HP@HL), and I've heard claims of it working on even slower setups (found it a bit hard to believe mind you).

They have donated one of these to the Myth Creator

[dcgaber]

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.

Re:500gb media center.

[Anonymous Coward]

WEll it's going to take a bit for it to get working in Mythtv, but it shouldn't take long since it already uses proper Linux-specific standards.

V4L2 (video for linux 2, is the re-done video input thing for Linux 2.6 and provides a standard API thingie for applications to latch into) and Alsa sound stuff.

So it shouldnt' take long.

If you want to try out Mythtv ready made check out
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

They have pre-made packages and you use yum/apt to install it over the internet. Makes things easier as Mythtv is somewhat difficult to setup anyways.

But it's VERY versitile, plus you have other tools like VLC/Icecast for video streaming (icecast now supports Ogg Theora video streaming), and mencoder transcoding capabilities from the Mplayer project which is VERY capable.

Easiest for me was to roll my own...

[Chuck Messenger]

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.

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 /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:

$ ivtv-ptune.pl 10 # tune to channel 10
$ cat /dev/video0 > someFile
^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 /dev/video0. Which is what I did. The hard part is the programming.

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!

Nice USB.. what about PCI?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:as opposed to Hauppauge's lack of support

[jbr439]

Hauppauge could provide what NVidia does and break the driver into two parts - a closed source part that contains the "brains" of the driver, and an open source part that provides the "glue" between the kernel and the closed source code.

Unless there is a valid technical reason for not doing this, I can only assume that Hauppauge does not care about the Linux market. Hence, two thumbs down.