On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Louis  Guillaume wrote:


> I'm interested in building a NetBSD appliance centered around
> Television/Video/Audio Capture and playback.

Cool idea.

> Does anyone have recent information on the status of the bktr driver?
> All the information I've found has been untouched since 2000 (which
> could be a good thing, a sign of stability??).

Well, it works. I use a Hauppauge WinTV (the cheapest of that series)
with a BT848.

> I'm also looking at what hardware to buy. It seems that amongst the
> Hauppauge cards there are some that have hardware mpeg encoders and some
> that don't. It will be necessary for my project to be able to capture
> audio/video.
>
> Supposedly the fxtv package does capture mpeg video and allow "pausing"
> of TV, but does this occur outside of the pci hardware or does this
> require a "video capture" device?

I don't think so, but I got problems to use fxtv for capturing movies or
even only pictures.
It captures a mpeg stream but fxtv cannot convert it. I got:
-rw-rw-r--  1 stefan  stefan  68653056 Dec 12 09:28 fxtv.AVraw
-rw-rw-r--  1 stefan  stefan   1108429 Dec 12 09:30 fxtv.mp2
-rw-rw-r--  1 stefan  stefan   2248801 Dec 12 09:29 fxtv.mpg
-rwxrw-r--  1 stefan  stefan       577 Dec 12 09:28 fxtv.sh

and I can view that mpeg with mplayer, but I currently don't know if there
is sound in that mpg.

BTW I use mplayer for watching TV becauseit is much faster and even
wviewable in full size mode.
And I think mplayer is also able of capturing videos, but I don't know for
sure.

> Somehow I suspect (because of the aged bktr driver) that some of the
> cooler features (pause TV, hardware-based mpeg2 encoding, remote control
> and others) are not yet implemented.

fxtv has some options for remote control, but since I don't have one I don'=
t
know more about it.

> What's the best way to find out the status of this project and would
> anyone be interested in helping me develop this driver for this purpose?

If my knowledge would have been better, I would :-(

Stef
--=20
"Ohne Nazis s=E4he es bei den =F6ffentlich-rechtlichen finster aus."
Harald Schmidt

[http://www.net-tex.de]