>
> 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
>>
>

On Feb 13, 2006, at 8:02 PM, Steven Sartorius wrote:

> 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
>


My PVR experiences:

I'm using a PVR-350 (on XP sorry but DVD authoring was easier): rule  
of thumb for CPU needs,  is if you have hardware mpeg-2 compression,  
you can get by with a 700- 800MHz CPU (or faster)- there will only be  
about 5% CPU load if you avoid the software mpeg compression.  Also  
should avoid VIA chipset mainboards, although there is a patch to  
help, the VIA chipset will be laggy.

I have the  MX400 card as well but don't like the video-out as well  
from it as that from the 350 itself; although using the TV-out on the  
350 limits software menu display a little (I use gbpvr, which does  
have better support than other solutions).

I looked into the netbsd/MythTV solution as well but it didn't look  
easy to do/ not completely supported/hard to tell my wife how to take  
clips from PBS programs to use clips in her teaching as either mpeg  
or DVD-R (the last was a major issue!).

Brian