Hmm... it would appear thtat the WinTV PVR project has just gotten far enough to initialize the card and be able to use it as a normal bttv card. Pretty impressive, since they're reverse engineering the drivers, but doesn't help me too much. (I wanna get something working soon. :) ) RE: the 250/350's encode /decode restrictions Does that mean you can't use the 350 to decode an MPEG/DVD and display it on the monitor? Or just that you can't save the uncompressed video/audio to disk? And while it'd be nice to be able to compress video generated by the computer (eg: video editing software) I don't know that I'd ever use it as such. Is the 350's decoder really necessary if your video card has a built-in mpeg decoder? I was looking at the myth-tv project for a while, but they do all their mpeg encoding in software, and they have problems with the audio and video losing sync. :( maybe the 250/350 is where I should be planning to spend my money.... Unless someone can give another hardware encoder a glowing recommendation... >Hauppauge has boards based on two different chipset families. Their orignal >hardware MPEG board was the PVR-PCI, an 878a+kfir based board. Stock bttv can >use this board as a straight tuner. There is a project to get its compression >engine, the kfir chip, working under linux. > > http;//pvr.sourceforge.net > >Their latest family the PVR-250/350 is based on iCompression's iTVC >processors. The 250 is encode only while the 350 includes hardware >decompression. Unfortunately, it's not a general-purpose hardware MPEG codec, >encoding is limited to what comes in via the video inputs and decoding is >limited to outputting to the video outputs. Regardless, this is more than >enough for most people. > >We (the IvyTV team) have gotten this family to work fairly well. We're >targeting V4L2 as our interface. > > http://ivtv.sourceforge.net > >One poster to the list managed to catch 20hrs of video with only one 2-3second >glitch which we think was caused by some other package. > >At this time we do not support uncompressed capture, mostly because we (I) >can't figure out how to properly configure the card to deliver YUV data. (I >get only the Y plane). And PCM audio capture also seems to be an issue. > >FWIW, every so often in the US, the 250 will go on sale for $100 after a mail >in rebate. > >John
