[mythtv] WinTV PVR-250 (hardware mpeg encoder)

Isaac Richards mythtv-dev@snowman.net
Thu Jan 9 16:44:28 EST 2003


On Thursday 09 January 2003 11:07 am, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> I've searched the list archives, and there appears to be some interest in
> making the WinTV PVR-250 work. There are currently reference drivers in
> the wild for this beast, and they work fairly well. There'a also an example
> application that does time shifting, recording to disk, etc. with various
> resolution and bitrate settings.

Those reference drivers are of _very_ dubious legal status.

> I'm willing to put my time and effort into this, but I need to get the
> following input from MythTV developers:
>
> 1) What would be the optimal method for MythTV to grab data from this
> card? From the V4L API specs i've read, it doesn't seem to have support
> for much else than YUV data, this kind of makes the PVR-250 useless =)

Something like the mjpeg extensions would be ideal. 

> 2) If the card is providing an MPEG1/MPEG2 datastream to MythTV, will
> MythTV be playing those formats (and using them for the timeshifting, and
> recording) or will the stream just be reencoded to MPEG4, or RTjpeg.

It'd probably have to play the mpeg2 stream natively.

> The output from this card is great, and I believe it would be a wonderful
> way of promoting MythTV considering the cost of the card (around $140) and
> the features of MythTV.

And you can buy a cpu that will produce better quality video with higher 
compression for $50.  I'm not really interested in the cards. =)

> Side note, ALT+F4 doesn't exit mythfrontend for me, it's completely
> possible that KDE is capturing this and doing something else with it, but
> it would be rather nice if something without a modifier key also quit (such
> as 'Q')

That's in CVS.

Isaac



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list