FreeBSD video recorder (was: FreeBSD as a HTPC!)

[John-Mark Gurney]

Kevin Downey wrote this message on Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 23:46 -0800:
> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Dieter <freebsd at sopwith.solgatos.com> wrote:
> >> I started on this track a while back, but the main problem I've had is
> >> that FreeBSD doesn't support any digital tuners.  Here in Australia we
> >> have digital TV with resolutions of up to 720p (1280x720
> >> non-interlaced) or 1080i (1920x1080 interlaced).  720p is better.
> >
> > Well... 720p is better in some ways, 1080i is better in others.
> > But for tuner support what matters is ATSC or DVB-T.
> >
> >> So what I do is to copy the saved MPEG files to the FreeBSD machine
> >> and use mplayer, along with a series of scripts, to play it.  I'm
> >> using a DVICO remote control (the one that came with the tuner), and
> >> not coincidentally this is one of the few TV remote controls which
> >> FreeBSD supports.
> >
> > There is a FreeBSD driver for the DViCO FusionHDTV5 if that's the tuner
> > you have.  I don't know if it supports DVB-T though...
> >
> > And Jason has written a driver that supports several cx88 based cards.
> > And there is the HDHomeRun that just needs Ethernet.
> >
> > So you can use FreeBSD for recording, if you have the right tuner.
> > Support for additional tuners would of course be welcome.
> 
> does anyone know how the heck you build the driver for the divco
> fusion? as far as I can tell it is a bunch of files in p4, which means
> it is a huge pain to get them. I think I did manage to build the
> kernel module but it made my amd64 machine kernel panic.
> 
> I sent an email to JohnMarkGurney with some questions, but I never got a reply.

Sorry, been a bit lax on reading email recently.  I've updated the
wiki page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/HDTV/DViCOFusionHDTV5Lite to contain
a bit more, and put a tarball of the perforce code up to make it easier
to fetch.

It was last compiled w/ a -current of early 2007, but there shouldn't
be any significant changes causing problems.  If there are, let me know.

> so saying the card is supported maybe a stretch.

I am getting close to not using mine anymore.  Now w/ the HDHomeRun
working so well, and about the same price per tuner as a Lite, it's hard
to support such a crappy chip as the bt878.  Plus, the people at
SiliconDust are interested in supporting their product on other platforms,
like FreeBSD, unlike DViCO..

Even w/ only two tuners and an ethernet card on the PCI bus doing a
single capture and sending out that stream via the ethernet card (yes,
only 5 MB/s on the PCI bus), I get fifo overruns.  It could be my
chipset or an agressive em card, but I switched to using a PCI-e NIC
and that solved it, but with such a sensitive card, it's hard to
continue support.

Though I will admit that I do ocassionally have udp socket buffer
overruns w/ the HDHomeRun, it works great, about to get a second to
replace the two Lite's in my machine...

I'll still provide some basic support, but don't expect to much...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."