Hello All

Having used MythTV for a few months on FreeBSD 5.3 with  PVR250 +  
Nvidia GF4 + TV out , I decided to scrap the whole idea, and I gave  
my mthbox away, and I cut back on the TV. The basic functions of  
MythTV work in FreeBSD but from what I remember most of the add ons  
were Linux centric . I hate when I find stuff like that.

The better option IMHO is to get a Tivo if you want to watch tv like  
that.  The other option we need to pool our money and pay someone to  
write a BSD driver for the PVR 250/350 so we can all sit back and  
make fun of our linux friends .


On Feb 13, 2006, at 10:24 PM, Brian McEwen wrote:

>
>>
>> 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

---
Mark Saad
nonesuch@bad-apples.org