On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 12:21:10AM -0500, Mike Hicks wrote: > (Sidenote: Just because I'm throwing out these abbreviations doesn't > mean I understand any of them. It's sufficient to just know that one is > generally not compatible with another, though I guess I saw some hinting > that European DVB cards might work with U.S. cable and satellite stuff. > Maybe.) Hauppauge (The people who make the WinTV cards) also have a WinDVB card, there are also various other cards that work in the USA+Linux > > In theory, it wouldn't be too difficult to get MythTV or other PVR > software to handle digital TV streams, since it can already handle the > MPEG2 stream coming off of the WinTV PVR-250 and -350 (among others). > Of course, having enough CPU power to decode the MPEG2 stream would be a > challenge. Also, one big question is the availability of > Linux-compatible hardware that will merely pass the over-the-air (or > over-the-wire) stream directly to the system without unnecessary > transcoding. It's available, and iirc, patches have been written that make use of it in MythTV (I'm unsure of the status of those patches, or if they've been accepted into the CVS tree) > Someday, when processors are running in the tens of gigahertz, dedicated > hardware won't be needed because the GNU Radio project will then be able > to decode the various modulation schemes in realtime. But, that's quite > a while off.. My P233MMX can decode a 16mbit MPEG-2 stream under linux, no need for any terribly high end hardware. MythTV requires more power because it's time shifting, so it's reading from the tuner device, encoding to mjpeg or divx (if it's not from a hardware encoder), and writing out to a ring buffer while another thread is reading off that same ringbuffer, decoding it, then sending it to the video card. Eventually the ITVC15 MPEG-1/2 decoder on the WinTV PVR will be hashed out, and MythTV will be able to use it for video output, this will further lower the amount of CPU required for a decent PVR. -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list