[NBLUG/talk] Quick note re: MythTV

Scott Doty scott at sonic.net
Tue May 2 04:56:22 PDT 2006


Hi,

Just thought I'd mention that MythTV can use firewire to a suitably-equipped
cable box in the Motorola DCT-6200 series (and perhaps others)...

Myth can change the channel via firewire (both internally, and with an
external program) -- and many channels are available for mpeg-2 capture,
including some HDTV...

The cable box will even hand you mpeg2 data for analog channels -- woot!

I broke down and bought a new workstation a few weeks ago, then discovered
that I can't use my (5V) Hauppauge WinTV card in my new syste -- so, my old
ws sits there as a slave backend.  I'm using NFSv3/udp for storage, with my
new ws as the server -- it also runs the master backend and (of course)
mythfrontend.  (Note that the myth docs are a bit ambiguous on this point;
they say you need to have at least one capture device on your master backend
-- but that turns out not to be the case...

One downside to this arrangement is setup -- there isn't any way to specify
with mythtv-setup that a given tuner supplies two capture methods.  So, I
have to be careful about scheduling conflicts, lest mythbackend change the
channel and start recording using (say) mpeg-2 when it is already recording
with the composite feed...

However, I've been pondering the mythconverg schema, and I think it might be
possible to set up such an arrangement with a few well-placed bits of
sq(uea)l ...

Another downside is figuring out which channels are available over the
firewire -- I have some ideas for how to scan them automatically, but won't
have a chance to figure that out until this weekend...

 -Scott
p.s. oh btw, you can daisy-chain dct-62xx's on one firewire buss for
multiple tuners...



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