HDTV Reception Now Available on Linux

-tji writes "A new company, www.pchdtv.com, has just released the first digital TV receiver card for Linux. Along with the Linux drivers, they have also modified xine to support HD playback and add XvMC support for MPEG2 hardware acceleration with some video cards. This has great potential for integration into PVR apps, like freevo and mythtv. There is also another project to reverse engineer drivers for the Teralogic TL880 based DTV cards. The one active developer has done a great job, but could use some help."

Re:Are the drivers "O.S.S." or not?

[Elm Tree]

According to their website they distribute with the card the sources for the V4L driver and the modified version of xine they talk about. Although they do talk about optionaly using NVidia cards to accelerate things, so they may encourage the use of NVidia's binary drivers. But either way, those are optional optimizations so...

Looks like a very nice card... If I had HDTV service I'd definately think about buying one.

novel idea - check the link

[dwk123]

Both drivers and extensive patches to Xine are open source and already available.

Well, not quite the first....

[edwardd]

This is the first card specifically for HDTV, but:

For a while now, DVB cards have been available with software for Linux that have been able to recieve and process HDTV satalite signals. The 'other' PVR app that doesn't seem to catch on in the US is VDR, located at http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr This is a full featured, open source PVR application that does work with DVB cards to show HDTV.

Reasons to make offical Linux drivers

[Felinoid]

1. Users will continually update drivers and eventually absorb them into vareous Linux projects taking support off your hands permenently.
2. Free advertsing on Freshmeat as your drivers are announced then again as projects absorb your drivers.
3. Free adveritsing on Slashdot.
4. Slimmer marketshare means greater sales amoung Linux users.

Reasons to NOT provide offical Linux drivers
1. If your suffering on the Windows side a quick throw in to support Linux will not save you.

2. It'll piss off Microsoft.

3. Your website will be slashdotted.

4. There is a lose lose factor on your drivers. If your drivers are too good users may not improve them if they suck to much users won't buy your product.

Your best bet is to always supply unoffical drivers directly into open source projects so that users will always look to the open source projects for support and not you while at the same time the open source projects give you free advertsing and they get slashdotted not you.

Not the first

[mocm]

There have been digital TV cards with open source Linux support for years. This may be the first card for the ATSC standard and doesn't even have an MPEG decoder, or why would the need xine.
Do they support the Linux DVB API, or at least the parts that are common in ATSC and DVB?
Are the drivers open source?

For more information on linux and digital TV see
LinuxTV [linuxtv.org]
Metzlerbros [metzlerbros.org]
and links on those sites.

Re:Well, not quite the first....

[mprinkey]

There are only a handfull of HDTV channels on direct-broadcast satellite feeds. DirecTV has HDNET, Discovery, ESPN, HBO and SHO in HD. The Dish lineup is similar. There is just not that much Satellite HD content available.

The DVB system that you pointed to is a nice setup, but there are no PC add-in cards that I know of that allow access to DirecTV or Dish digital feeds whether SD or HD. The one exception might be via DirecTivos which can be hacked to allow extraction of the video feeds, but this is as a postprocessing task, not realtime. Perhaps there are add-in cards for Big-Ugly Dishes to decode HD broadcasts, but I am not aware of them.

I believe that Sony is planning to produce an HD DirecTivo receiver shortly for timeshifting HD content. I don't know if they will do a better job of hack-proofing that unit than with other Tivo units, so offline HD extraction is still an open question.

Maybe they can provide us (developers) some HW?

[k-s]

Hello,

I'm a core Freevo developer and I have something to say:

Hardware makers:

PLEASE SEND YOUR PRODUCTS TO PROJECTS DEVELOPERS! We don't have money/machine to buy every HW on the earth, so if you want to be supported, please provide at least one board to the project!

Recently we won an Epia and Hauppage PVR-250 and they will be better supported than others, just because we can test it.

If you like the idea and want to be supported, contact us via developers list (freevo: [e-mail] [mailto])

Thanks, Gustavo

Re:Not the first

[mocm]

Just had a look at the drivers. They just modified the bttv drivers a little and added a tuner driver with big chunks of firmware. No frontend device no demux device, just a TS dump.
They should have taken a look at the DVB API and its history, which also started with a slightly modified v4l API, but has matured quite a lot over the past few years.
They could have used the software demuxer which is already in the 2.6er test kernels.

My review of the card

[pyite69]

I have one of these and it is basically as
advertised. I use it to capture streams on Linux,
though I still play them back on my Windows-based
card which has component video support.

However, the xine patches work OK.

It is still a hacker's delight, though, and will
continue to be until all of the modifications
make it into the xine and v4l trees; and into at
least the Debian Unstable package system. The
software works, but takes some effort to get
installed and running.

I am quite satisfied with my purchase!!! Everyone
who supports Linux should buy one, if only to
support the business model.

Mark

Re:Drivers

[pyite69]

You can download the contents of the CDROM from
their web site. It includes full GPL source for
the driver and Xine.

Research first, then post your inane complaints.

Re:Digital Cable Card

[PatJensen]

Here's a solution for you.

Don't use the IR blaster on your TiVo. Upgrade to a Series 2 standalone with OS 4.0 and use a serial cable to connect your digital cable box. This gets rid of the slow channel change delays and pop-ups that come up when you change channels.

Despite what some say, you have to have a Series 2 to use serial channel change support. There is a port on Series 1, but it won't work - and you will just be sending IR without a blaster.

If you are on Comcast/AT&T, quite a few of the Motorola boxes support serial with the latest firmware. Check out the TiVo forum on AVS (www.avsforum.com) for more information.

Pat

pcHDTV card

[brandon]

Pre-orders have begun for the pcHDTV HD-2000 card and the cards will start to ship this week. Several lucky people who have contacted me (or pcHDTV) already have the card and have been enjoying HDTV on Linux. My part is HDTV/Linux that I have been working on support for the card in MythTV for the last month, but due to my very busy schedule all features are not complete (seeking and handling low HDTV signals). I invite anyone who is interested in HDTV and MythTV to come by #mythtv on the freenode irc network and talk with me (bbeattie). The largest problem right now is obtaining a HDTV program schedule as xmltv does not provide this.

Also, I have written a Linux HTPC how-to that talks about the card and other Linux HTPC like issues at www.sllug.org/how-to/linux-htpc/introduction.html . It will be very useful for anyone wanting to do HDTV or HTPC like features with Linux.

Re:cool

[Mike Hicks]

Uncompressed HDTV uses a lot of bandwidth. Compressed HDTV does not. Assuming 24 bits per pixel, a 1080i signal would require nearly 200MBytes per second (and even more if whatever device you're talking to only does 32bpp), which goes far beyond the standard 133MByte/s of a normal PCI bus. However, it's well within the domain of a 64-bit PCI66 slot or an AGP 1x slot (both of which operate at 533MByte/s, if memory serves).

A full-bandwidth ATSC stream can carry nearly 20 Mbit/s of data, which translates to around 2.5MByte/s.

The GNU Radio people weren't really doing either of those things -- they did a really raw capture of that ~20Mbit/s stream (though with error correction added in, an ATSC broadcast runs more like 25-30Mbit/s). With the sampling hardware they used, it added up to something around 40MByte/s of data being captured, according to their How to HDTV [comsec.com] page.

Re:cool

[i_am_nitrogen]

HDTV uses a 4:2:0 color sampling, which means that the luminance channel is 1920x1080, and the two chrominance channels are 960x540. So, it's not 24 bits per pixel. It's more like 16. You might be able to squeeze it over a PCI bus, but an AGP video card ought to be able to do it on a fast enough system (2.4Ghz P4 or XP2600+ probably).

Since NVidia's binary drivers have support for motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform, the processor has less work to do, and can offload work to the video card. Since the data can be sent over the AGP bus, it should be possible to get full speed HDTV decoding.

Re:Great news

[sc00p18]

I got my TV card working in 2.6 (test3) after applying the patches here: http://bytesex.org/patches/ [bytesex.org]