By dint of experience I've found that MythTV works best with a  
hardware MPEG2 compression card (like a Hauppauge PVR-250 or, in my  
case, an Aver Media M179) and a video card with TV-out that uses  
XvMC, which pretty much narrows the field to Nvidia (I have a  
GeForce4 MX 440).  It is possible to run MythTV with a software  
capture card (like the Brooktree/Conexant that is supported under  
NetBSD) but the results are spotty and you need a reasonably powerful  
CPU (which equals noise -- a no-no for a living room based box).  I  
briefly looked at seeing if I could port the Linux ivtv drivers (for  
hardware capture cards) to NetBSD but quickly realized I had neither  
the time nor the skill!  In addition, as far as I know, Nvidia  
supplies drivers that only work with Linux and I don't believe these  
would work under Linux emulation.  In short, as much as it would be  
nice to have MythTV run on a nice sane, stable NetBSD box I don't  
think we're there yet...


Steve


On Feb 12, 2006, at 19:50, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> Is anyone working on anything that might let NetBSD run MythTV?  I'm
> contemplating setting it up in my house; that means at least one new
> Linux box for the backend, plus converting one and maybe two existing
> NetBSD boxes.  Just for the sake of system administration sanity, I'd
> rather not do that.  (I confess I have no idea what pieces we're
> missing.  Drivers for the tuner cards?  For the video cards?)
>
> 		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
>