On 4/22/05, Lee Larson <llarson at louisville.edu> chastised: > On Apr 22, 2005, at 2:06 AM, Henri Yandell wimped out: > > > Me neither :) I bought the fancy Hauppage TV card (PVR-350) and after > > a lot of work got it to work in Windows, and gave up in Linux when I > > realised I had to install kernel modules from source. That's been a > > sign for me over the years that something is too much effort. > > > > I saw somebody recommending the PVR-250 card (no TV out) and a > > separate video card with a TV/out, and I've got to agree with them. > > I don't know where you've been reading, but nothing extreme has to be > done to get the PVR-350 working with Myth. Mine works wonderfully. The > simplest approach is to download the KnoppMyth [1] install CD image.
Didn't work for me. I tried it in the live mode, rather than trying to install from it. It flaked out somehow. One complaint for the 350 is that only Hauppage's software (in Windows) can use it as an out, so better video software like VLC are unable to play on the TV. Thus it's better to have a 250 and a TV-out on a gfx card to gain independence in the Windows world. On Linux though I'd expect the driver to just set it up as a device for output. It's been a few months since I gave up and decided to work on getting the network storage and front-end parts of things, but I think the problem I eventually hit was that the PVR-350 Model 990 required ivytv 0.2 (do you have a 980?) and many of the easy ways of doing things only had ivytv 0.1. KnoppMyth seems to still have 0.1, and SuSE's automatic recognition only had the 0.1 I think. I did what I usually did in such cases and decided to revisit it later on when the newer binaries had hopefully propagated out to the various distros. I have heard good things about Myth on Gentoo (yet another linux distro), and was wondering if Ubuntu (similar concept to Gentoo, but more up to date) would work well. > .. <snip> .. > identical. Whether downstairs or upstairs I can schedule, delete, watch > and burn recordings to DVD. I can also play DVDs and CDs and rip them > to the hard drive. Yep. Definitely nicer than my current 'walk to the basement to turn the Windows box on and hit record' system. I've got a working prototype now. It's clunky, but is showing where the problems are. I'm using: * A Linksys NSLU2 device with USB hard-drives as my network storage. * A Windows PC with a PVR-350 to record (unsure how to strip adverts yet). * To view, I'm using a base model Mac Mini, wired to the network as our wireless is 802.11b and with the video-out going to the TV. The headphone socket on the Mini is attached to the AUX channel of our DVD-player, which is an odd Panasonic player that came with its own surround speakers. The next step is: * Another Linksys NSLU2 in 'unslung' mode, which means to change the Linksys Linux for a more open version of Linux. Then I'll install mt-daapd on it and it'll become an iTunes server for the USB hard-drive attached to it. * Remote control for the Mac Mini. Unsure if any of the options are any good, but tempted to buying one of the programmable Mac remotes and configuring it for VLC and iTunes. * Revisit the Windows record box at some point to see if I can get Myth working. Probably get a 2nd hard-drive so I can keep the working Windows setup pristine. Problems: * Obviously the Windows recording software is a big problem. It's pathetic. * Playback on the Mac Mini has speed problems (it stutters occasionally). I'm not quite sure where though. I can attach a Windows laptop to the same network cable and using the same software (VLC) I can play without problems; however the Mac Mini itself is not bottlenecking on memory or cpu. Possible that the OS X version of VLC is the culprit, or that the Mini is bottlenecking elsewhere (Bus, Network card, VGA-out). * NSLU2 is hard on the hard drives. It never spins down, so unsure if that's damaging to the drives or just means it's burning unnecessary watts. 'OpenSlug' the forthcoming built-from-scratch version of 'Unslung' promises to have power-saving. * NSLU2 has a limit of 2 usb drives. 'OpenSlug' promises to allow the use of USB hubs. Hen | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be April 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
