[mythtv-users] MythTV on PPC

[Gregorio Gervasio Jr.]

>>>>> On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 22:06:18 -0700, Cedar McKay <cedarmckay at mac.com> said:

c> Super, I'm looking forward to it.

        I've just sent my patch to the list.  Give it a try.  I'm not
sure Isaac will accept it soon so I'd appreciate it if someone else
could test it.  You can apply it with "patch -p0".  For your G3, I
think you can edit "settings.pro" and change "-mcpu=7400" to
"-mcpu=750".  Let me know if you run into problems.

c> Maybe at the same time you can enlighten me about this big-endian
c> issue. I've done a bit of poking around and found a couple of things
c> that suggest that PPC supports big _or_ little endian words. Here are
c> a couple of quotes I found on message boards:

        Yes, the PowerPC can run in both modes but both Linux and
MacOS X use big-endian mode.  I think little-endian mode is used in
some embedded systems.

        MythTV is affected because the nuv file is a binary file which
has little-endian fields in some headers -- these fields need to be
byte-swapped so that they're interpreted correctly on PPC.  The pixmap
RGB and sound stream formats are similarly affected.

        MythTV is not really different from any other software that
reads/writes binary files.  It's just that most Unix software works
because they've already been ported to big-endian machines (like Sun,
HP, and IBM workstations).  For older stuff, they may have even been
developed on big-endian machines.  I guess it's really only when new
binary file formats show up that some porting needs to be done.  (I
remember when xmms would just generate screeching sounds on LinuxPPC!)
-- 
Gregorio Gervasio, Jr.
gtgj at pacbell.net