Headless box with PVR-250 - ideas needed

[Saul A Peebsen]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 01:44:50 +0200
Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen at broadpark.no> wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:04:38 -0500
> Saul A Peebsen <jaglover at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > So I did my homework, at least I thought I did. I read the Wiki
> > which tells us PVR-x50 works with MythTV. I bought a PVR-250 for
> > this very purpose, to work with MythTV backend. I crawled in dusty
> > attic installing cables. I hacked the drivers to make them work
> > with my card. All this was in vain, MythTV does not work with this
> > card.
> 
> To be precise: the current version of MythTV in ports (0.24_1) doesn't
> work with your card, yes?

Yep, it does not.
 
> My main MythTV backend has a PVR-500 card (= 2 x PVR-150s), but runs
> a very old version of MythTV (0.20).
> My test machine has a PVR-350 in it, and ran MythTV  0.22 happily.
> No, we didn't succed in making MythTV 0.23 work with that card, and we
> haven't (yet) succeded with MythTV 0.24.

That's news to me, I was thinking newer version can handle the hardware
better ... 

> > Now I need some ideas, how could I at least watch TV in my desktop
> > using that card in headless box, buried in the closet? 
> 
> Well, the card needs a driver for it to work. For MythTV that means
> that you have to have a working mythbackend install on that machine at
> least.
> If you could live with an older version of MythTV, you could always
> try to portdowngrade to MythTV 0.22 and see if that one would work
> with your card.

I'd rather not downgrade.
 
> Other options:
> vdr is in ports (I have just tried it briefly, to me it looks as
> difficult to get working as MythTV was initially). YMMV

Hmmm, VDR can be viewed over the network?
 
> You could run another os on your backend (Linux?) and just run the
> mythfrontend on your (FreeBSD) desktop.
> Note: you *must* use the same version of MythTV (actually, the same
> version of the MythTV protocol) on the frontend as you do on the
> backend, or ity won't work.

Well, the situation is a little more complicated. I have home network,
my PC, wifes, one media center and one laptop. All of these have
one single OS installed and it is Gentoo. My desktop has MythTV backend
running with pcHDTV 5500. The trouble starts when something is
recording or Wife wants to watch while I'm watching or I shut down my
box. So I thought adding one master backend would solve these problems.
The only box suitable for this job is my home server, which is running
FreeBSD ... It is not very powerful, thus I got an MPEG encoder
card ... PVR-250.

> So yes, there are options, none of them perfect.

Well, currently I log into server over SSH, do cat /dev/cxm0 > file.mpg
where file is created on an NFS shared volume and use mplayer to watch
it on my desktop, works fine.
I wonder if there is a way to access /dev/cxm0 over LAN (some magic
with netcat perhaps?), without logging in over SSH, so Wife could watch
it from her desktop. SSH login is a little too much for her ...

--
Thanks for reply, Saul :)