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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.
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!!!
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
Hauppauge PVR-250 is what I used on mine.
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?
" Ofcource I've yet to see a company make something compatable with my satalite service. So, in the meantime I'm stuck with the DVR in my Sat Receiver."
you basically can use almost any DVR with an external satellite set top box. You just route the video/audio output of the STB to the DVR/encoding card and use an IR blaster or serial cable to control the STB (i.e. change the channels at the appropriate time)
The only rub really would be if it's an HDTV satellite service, as that's a different wrinkle =)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
...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.
"I read recently (sorry lost the link) that we can't record HD signals from cable or satellite since they are encrypted. The amount of information from an HD feed is huge and with current technology would take a 6GHz CPU to decrypt in real-time."
.17 has some preliminary support for such an arrangement, again depending on if your firewire port is enabled and some other factors on your particular STB (although I'm confused as whether they have to have the firewire port be unencrytped or not, or what the regs are, to be honest...)
Well not ALL satellite traffic is encrypted. There's a ton of FTA DVB satellite signals out there... even hidef ones (ok they are pbs, but still... mmmmm NOVA...
There are a few HDTV cards that CAN decode unencrypted QAM signal via digital cable, but that depends on your cable company not encrypting which is hit or miss...
There's also the possibility of pulling the HDTV content over firewire (and controlling the STB via firewire) and I believe the latest mythtv
*Shrug* so I guess you're basically right, but it's not out of the question, but there's not a good legal way to decrypt digital cable (or directV/dishnetwork) like using a CableCard in some HDTV's now...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
there's a lot to what you are saying... it's absolutely true that the satellite PVR, takes the digital stream and writes the digital bits right to the local disk and there's no loss of quality.
BUT there are other reasons to build a PVR... There are satellite cards out there, and if the satellite companies allowed you to legitimately use your subscription access card with one of these cards, it would be a moot benefit.
Look, the reason to roll your own PVR has little to do with economics. If you can get a DVR for 5 dollars extra a month on your cable bill, it'll take a while to recoup a PC investment alone...
So if it's not about economics/being cheap... what's it about alfie?
It's about freedom. freedom to move content around. Burn DVDs... Let me see you move your favorite show to your smartphone, PDA, PVP, laptop, etc... Freedom to add features at will. Does your satellite DVR let you add movie times, pull in comics, or get slashdot rss feeds? IT's the freedom to tinker...
You don't get that with your satellite provided DVR, IMHO.
*Shrug* YMMV
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
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.
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.
;) - even with DRM) should play fine with a 3GHz CPU supposedly, and mpeg4 usually more cpu intensive than mpeg2 (at same resolution/bitrate).
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
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).
///<sig
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
Both forms are correct for modern usages.
Just because an error is moderately widespread doesn't mean it's no longer an error -- and indeed, there are certainly many dissenting opinions with regard to the acceptability of using apostrophes to pluralize acronyms.
I never understood the old reasoning behind something like "PVRs." That just doesn't make any sense. "Personal Video Recorderss" eh?
The acronym is for an individual unit -- a PVR is a personal video recorder, not a "personal video recorders". "PVRs", thus, refers to the plural: "personal video recorders". Quite appropriate.
http://www.plextor.be/products/px-tv402u.asp?choic e=ConvertX%20PVR%20PX-TV402U
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.
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.
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 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.
What makes you think I go to parties?
I actually tried flashing my 716 on freedos and dr dos. each time I got some spew about ASPI stuff.
I had to install f***ing windows to update the thing. And I still can't make it play DVD video.
So yeah, Plextor needs to do better to make me think they support Linux/OSS.
Right now I envision them as Jim Carrey bent over, talking funny while trying to make his buttocks move like a mouth. (very hard to take seriously)
PLEXTOR, GET YOUR EFFIN' ACT TOGETHER!
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Yes, the PAL model will do stereo (A2, NICAM, etc), I just haven't written the support for it yet. Similarly with VBI, although it's also coming. (Incidentally, teletext support has nothing to do with stereo reception in the audio decoder other than the fact that they're both "fringe" features that are often omitted from cheap products.)
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)