Hardware recommendations for MythTV/FreeBSD

[David C. Myers]

Adam Maloney wrote:

>
> That's kind of what I suspected...everyone is pretty sure it will work 
> fine, but no one wants to out-right guaranty it :)  But unless I hear 
> any real negative feedback from others, I think my mind is made up on 
> the PVR-250.



Mine's great.  The latest version of the pvr250 port finally added 
support for my tuner -- I believe the driver now recognizes 17 tuner 
types.  Be aware that the driver places some funny limitations on the 
output formats.  It does not do DVD half size resolutions (352x480), 
even though this is a format standardized by the DVD Powers-That-Be.  It 
does, however, do 480x480, which is not a standard resolution.  The 
driver also hard codes limits on the encoder bitrate for each output 
size, and the limits seem to produce a somewhat more blocky capture than 
I'd like.  Small complaints, though.  It works well.

I ended up wrapping some shell scripts around "at" to implement my 
"PVR".  The gist of it is, "dd < /dev/cxm0 > output.mpg" with a timer 
that stops the process after an appropriate amount of time.

Someday I might write some code that reads in XMLTV format to automate 
the scheduling of shows I want.

Other notes...  The MythTV/FreeBSD port doesn't compile cleanly, last I 
looked.  And the author has released a patch that adds the Video4Linux 
ioctls to the cxm driver code, which itself already requires kernel 
patches to install.  MythTV won't work without these ioctls.  Patches 
upon patches...  But the V4L hacked version is behind the official 
version in the ports tree, and thus supports fewer tuners.

Oh, also, search back in the archives a few weeks for my question (and 
John-Mark Gurney's very helpful answer) regarding capturing over-the-air 
broadcasts.  The driver always uses cable tunings, even if you tell it 
you have an antenna...

-David.