Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:58:16 -0800 From: John-Mark Gurney <jmg@funkthat.com> To: Kevin Downey <redchin@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD video recorder (was: FreeBSD as a HTPC!) Message-ID: <20081130195816.GB34842@funkthat.com> In-Reply-To: <1d3ed48c0811282346p1c7b6c52q714d5b6ccd0941ce@mail.gmail.com> References: <20081129030722.GD26930@dereel.lemis.com> <200811290710.HAA09724@sopwith.solgatos.com> <1d3ed48c0811282346p1c7b6c52q714d5b6ccd0941ce@mail.gmail.com>
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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@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."
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