I would like to build my own HTPC.
I have a Peg2, what Software do i need?
Is there a Software Suite or LiveCD like PegXLin or PegXMac for this kind of task? If there is an Solution can i buy it?
I know that i need Linux and MythTV for that.
Has somebody Build his own HTPC with Peg2 and MythTV on Linux?
Was ist GGS-Data or ComputerCity who wanted to build a HTPC with a Peg?

It was the Pegasos.org crew, together with Gunne who tried the HTPC.
We failed when it came to TV-card and DVB Linux/PPC support.

ThePlayer,

The pictures are still online.

Here

You can use any linux-distribution you prefer, and use any case of your choice, that suites the Pegasos of course.

Also the more 'normal sized' LCD-TV's is coming down in price, and even not similar priced as an analog TV yet, the difference have come smaller.

It is very nice to use the Pegasos together with a such LCD-TV.

Gunne

[ Edited by gunne on 2005/7/5 19:20 ]

But it must be doable, look at the HTPC from Genesi!

What is your video source ?
Is it analog cable TV, digital cable, satellite ?

Once you know you have to identify which capture card you need and check if the corresponding drivers (ivtv, dvb) work on LinuxPPC.
Then you need to find/buid a PPC linux MythTV.

Analog Cabal afaik.

Where can i get MythTV PPC?

Quote:

I am doing it, I am doing it!!!

... rebuilding my hometheatre after my move to a new apartment

It's no fun I tell you.. no fun at all ... I have seen more cable in two days than an average electricengineer in his whole life

A live CD for this would be über-cool IMHO!

Regarding the TV cards, I think the one they used at the FTF is cool, that one had two separate tuners so you could record one show while you view another! BTW, is the Radeon analogue TV-out supported in Linux? I haven't tried myself ...

Of course DVB would be nice too, but only if there is a way to use a smartcard to unlock certain channels. I don't know about the situation in your countries, but here only a few of the digital channels are "free", the rest are encrypted and requires a subscription and a smartcard key from the broadcaster.

Also, Sweden is about to completely terminate analoge terrestrial broadcasts, in my home town for example there will be *no* more analogue broadcasts from September and onwards.

ThePlayer,

Dont understand what you mean by double ?

Anyway, why I mentioned LCD-TV, is because they also offer an ordinary VGA-input. That makes it much easier, and gives much better picture quality then any TV-out on any graphicscard or any DVB-card possible can give.

The problem we occured, when I had a deep look into this was with using different kinds of credit-card for Pay-TV channels.

It was not 100% sure that all kind of various credit-card for PAY-TV was possible to use with the card-reader that was available to use together with the DVB-card. I also found a lot of discussions around this issue on internet.

DVB-cards are in other aspects very nice cards as some of them also have mpeg-decoders onboard and also offer six channel sorround sound.

So out of this I came to conclusion the best as a user of digital TV or Pay-TV (satellite, cable or broadband) is to use the equipment the particularly TV-channel company offer together with their subscription. Here in Sweden and in Scandinavia we have two companies, Canal Digital and Viasat.

To use a computer in addition to this gives a lot of more possibilties. You have harddrive, DVD, internet connection, keyboard...

You can play games, you can watch videos, you can browse the internet, you can do work, and you can watch TV.

Freevo and MythTV is interfaces, that gives configurable menues, that you can set up also with a personal taste on it.

@ gunne: I mean it must be do able to have TV-Out working, cos the HTCP from Genesi can.

@ hooligan: What are you doing?
Do you have MythTV or Freevo running on your Peg on Linux?

Player

I have Freevo running on my box but it has no altivec accelration and is too slow to capture video properly, its only partially working..

magnetic

The FTF Best Of Show Digital Entertainment Center did NOT have TV-out. That Plasma screen was driven from a DVI/VGA cable.

There is Radeon TV out in Xorg patch form somewhere, we are investigating it.

There are DVB-S and DVB-T cards in the world (try googling for Nebula DVB-T) which are fully supported under Linux.

Pieter used a Hauppauge range of cards for the HTPC, which take analogue television signals and enode them to MPEG2. There is no digital television decoding involved (no DVB or ATSC).

Cheers!

I compiled a TVout-Xorg/gatos yesterday, which works very good with my Radeon9000pro...
Already made a quick "cd ga" REV2 and the livecd also works
on TV including all GL-stuff.... (but screen on computer-monitor
is too small....)
("cd ga" REV1 (w.o. TVout) is on the way to gunne btw)

TVout on my PVR350 (ivtv-drivers) has very good video/audio, but
it freezes after some seconds, probably as of VIA-board or PIO
mode only or sth like that...

Maybe I'm going to update "cd ga" and maybe I'm going to make
a MythTV-livecd, but some help for the different tv-cards/configs
is needed...

cheers
frostwork

How is the TV-Output in MythTV handeld? Trough the TV-Card or GFX Card?
Frostwork plz upload your "TVout-Xorg/gatos"
to pegasosforum.de and morphzone

The PVR350 has a good video and sound output.
The drawback is that if you want to use it for other applications the display is not accelerated (so you need a fast CPU to push the data to the TV card memory).

The other option is to display the video capture through the regular video card (nvidia has some nice support for scaling).
It is CPU intensive too as you are both encoding and decoding/displaying at the same time for live TV.
I think that Magnetic must have used a bttv card which has no HW support for encoding nor for decoding. That's why Mythtv liveTV must have been too slow.

I have been running Mythtv on a celeron 300 /PVR 350 (using PVR350 video out) for over a year without any problem for PVR functions but I had to change the CPU to a 1.4 Ghz celeron to have smooth video playing and half decent PVR to AVI / MPEG export.

A mythtv liveCD for the Pegasos would be great. Look at what this guy did.

This is what I used to set up my PVR and it works great.


It looks that someone got mythtv to work on the Pegasos. He is giving some hints for ivtv drivers.

[ Edited by cdfr on 2005/7/7 12:31 ]

ThePlayer,

TV-out is from the graphicsboard, TV-input is through any TV-card, or in the way suggested using other cards in this thread.

Frostwork,

Very nice !

Maybe, we will include some live-cd for free with each new machine sold, for trying pushing the platform forward if thats ok for you ?

Gunne

Hi!

Yep, tvout is via radeon, not via tv-card.
Sadly it ONLY supports 800x600, so the 640x480 and bigger than 800x600 isn't shown...
The tv-out via tv-card also works with ivtv (it has REALLY good
audio/video :) ), but sadly ivtv doesn't work here on my peg with DMA enabled, so I have to use it in PIO-mode, which is VERY CPU hungry....
@gunne: feel free to bundle the cds for free :)
(I got a ODW for free, thanks to genesi :) )

As I don't have net at home and uploading about 150 MB xorg
via netcafe isn't very funny, I'm afraid I can't upload it...
But I can try to make some unofficial xorg-.debs and send them via snailmail to s.o. wanting to upload :)
(debs will need some time...)
cheers
frostwork

ps: Maybe I'll use freevo instead of mythtv....

I think 800x600 is enough for TV and DVD, but not enough for HDTV. But without HDTV in germany i don't bother.
What is the best solution ivtv, MythTV or Freevo?
Is it possible to use a FTP-Server with the software to share Video/Audio with HTPC? And can i use a browser to Surf the net from the HTPC?

@ Frostwork you could send it to me via snailmail, and i could share it as a torrent File, got my PC-Box 24/7 online!

[ Edited by ThePlayer on 2005/7/8 14:39 ]

If you look at the link I posted the guy who made it work says:
"There was a slight problem with the ivtv module and busmastering of the pci device, but a little setpci action fixed that (will post with the howto)."

Pieter Van den Abeele must also have found a way to make it working.

Hi!


@cdfr:

Yes, i've downloaded your link (thx) to read it offline at home...
Though I already knew about the busmastering-prob and
had it already fixed, I anyway can't get the card to work in DMA
mode... Maybe the pvr350 sharing same IRQ with my USB2.0 card
is the prob or sth... Will look deeper into it...

@theplayer

ivtv is only a driver for pvr-cards like the 350 from hauppauge
mythtv and freevo are frontends (which both support ivtv)

as of xorg/gatos:

As it is really not complicated to make an own xorg-tvout and
it'd take me lots of time to bundle the stuff correctly I'd prefer to give you the following link to compile it on your own...
If you really can't get it working i can still package it,
but till then I have some more time on freevo-live project :)

LINK:

http://megahurts.dk/rune/tv_output.html

. I only tested the xorg-snap linked in the readme, maybe newer ones do also work

- I always (with every xorg/xfree?) have a compile error
on a font (not sure which now)
to compile anyway till end I used "make -ik"
(surely not very professional, but it worked and i can live with 1 missing font...)

cheers
frostwork