[mythtv-users] burning to CD, networking and bugs?

[Ray Olszewski]

At 06:47 AM 8/4/2003 -0500, Chris Kahney wrote:
>I'm new to MythTV so I apologize if I ask stupid questions or questions 
>that have been answered before, but is there a simple way to burn a 
>recorded video onto a CD using MythTV?

No, but there is a way to do it using other standard Linux packages. 
Without going into all the details, you use "mkisofs" to create an image of 
the CD you want to burn, and"cdrecord" (one of several alternatives) 
actually to burn the CD. This procedure refers to iso9660 CDs; you can also 
make VCDs, but the procedure is a bit more involved and involves different 
applications software.

You should be aware, though, that Myth's video encoding format is 
non-standard. For these CDs to be useful, you'll probably need to re-encode 
the video in some standard way ... to MPEG-1 (for VCDs) or a standard 
MPEG-4 (like DivX) for most anything else. This topic is discussed here 
regularly ... look in the archives under "transcode".

>  Also, how easy is it to access a PC setup for MythTV over a network?

What does this mean? "access"?

If you just want filesystem-level access, you can do it with Samba 
(provides standard Windows networking), NFS (provides standard Unix-style 
networking), or other, more specialized approaches. (These are standard 
Linux packages, not parts of Myth itself.)

If you want something else, restate your question more clearly.

>If I can't burn videos with MythTV at least I can burn them with another pc.
>
>Also, are there any major bugs with MythTV right now?
>
>I plan on setting up a cheap $200 2000 XP system in the near future and 
>would like to know what I'm getting myself into.  I plan on using a WinTV 
>card I already have and a Nvidia TNT2 Ultra for video-output.  The TNT2 
>card starts the tv output from the moment the PC is turned on (i.e. can 
>access bios, etc), so I don't think that should have any Linux problems, 
>long as their are drivers.

Make sure the WinTV card uses a bt878 chipset (with most ot their 
inexpensive cards, Hauppauge changed chipsets earlier this year, to one 
that is not yet supported by the Linux V4L stuff). I'm not familiar with 
the "Nvidia TNT2 Ultra" video card, so you might want to check at 
www.xfree86.org, or at nVidia's own Web site, whether either the standard X 
driver or nVidia's own drop-in driver for X supports both TV out AND 
XVideo. A "cheap $200 2000 XP system" will probably be fast enough to serve 
your purposes, but you may have to make some quality compromises

.