I mentioned at the meeting today that I've been playing with MythTV[1] and some other TV applications on Linux. I chatted with someone for a while toward the end of the meeting and he gave me his card so I could send him a copy of this e-mail directly, but I must have dropped it somewhere. Sorry, hopefully he'll find this note eventually. Anyway, I've been using MythTV off and on since late last year. I purchased an ATI TV-Wonder[2] (not the VE[3], which is missing stereo and S-Video). First, I tried version 0.7, which kind of fell off into the abyss in February or March when the program it uses to download TV listings, XMLTV, became incompatible somehow. Some weeks passed, and then version 0.8 came out about mid-March (it should be noted that a development version was available through CVS the whole time). Around this time, my roommates and I got forced out of the place I was living in and I ended up living on my own. While I had originally dedicated a roommate's old 1GHz/133FSB Athlon box for recording and playing, I now only have my 1.3GHz/266FSB Athlon desktop to do encoding. Originally, I'd been encoding MythTV's hacked-up version of MPEG4 video at 480x480 resolution, but I increased that to 640x480 on my desktop. That might be a little too much, and the encoding can skip quite a bit when I'm actively using my machine while it's recording. However, version 0.8 has the nifty feature of allowing encoder and player computers to be separated. I have often watched shows on my 1GHz PIII laptop (connected via a 100Mbit/s switch, though the actual bitstream is on the order of 3500kbit/s), though the LCD screen leaves something to be desired in viewability.. When I was using version 0.7, I had been trying to play the video on other machines with other programs, but I never had any luck. There is a patch[5] to play version 0.8 files with MPlayer[6], though. Other than MythTV, I've also been playing with a program called tvtime[7], which goes a step further than most TV applications for Linux and lets you watch 60FPS deinterlaced video, though it takes a lot of CPU time to do it. The CVS version I've been watching also features two somewhat flaky 3:2 pulldown algorithms for producing 24FPS output when watching movies and other "filmed" shows on TV (I think they get confused more often than they should because so much content on TV these days gets run through black boxes that do "time compression" and screw up the framerate). But, when it works, it's beautiful.. For people stuck in Windows and for the curious, tvtime borrows a lot of code and ideas from another open-source project called DScaler[8]. Okay, it's becoming obvious that I watch way too much TV ;-) I'll quit now. References: 1. http://www.mythtv.org/ (currently having DNS troubles?) 2. http://www.ati.com/products/pc/tvwonder/ ATI TV-Wonder (hmm, now listed as a "legacy" product) 3. http://www.ati.com/products/pc/tvwonderve/ ATI TV-Wonder VE 4. http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/ XMLTV 5. http://dijkstra.csh.rit.edu:8088/~mdz/mythtv/mplayer-0.90pre10+mythtv.patch MPlayer patch 6. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ 7. http://tvtime.sf.net/ (can't connect to them at the moment either) 8. http://deinterlace.sf.net/ DScaler -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Shin: a device for finding / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ furniture in the dark. \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20030503/8faa2fef/attachment.pgp