[mythtv] MPEG-2 WinTV PVR 250

[Bruce Markey]

John S Flowers wrote:
> Looks like people have the WinTV PVR 250 working with MPEG-2 (onboard) 
> support. The card is $149 US and can be found for slightly less using 
> online search engines. It has a built-in tuner (125 channels), supports 
> stereo sound, comes with a remote and has onboard iTVC15 MPEG encoding.
> 
> Here's the forum:
>  http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1378
> 
> Here's the driver:
>  http://www.shspvr.com/pvr2_drv-apps.html
> 
> Here's a USB page w/info:
>  http://pvrusb.sourceforge.net
> 
> Now I'm really interested in getting one of these cards and seeing if I 
> can do MPEG-2 native output using hardware acceleration.

Um, don't be too quick to assume this is a done deal. If
you look more closely you'll see that these are barely
experiments based on building wrappers around the windoze
code. Don't expect a v4l driver that you just drop in and
start using with existing Linux applications.

I've been wainting the last couple years for a Linux driver
that supports an MPEG encoding card. You can find a bunch
of MPEG cards at http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards .
Here's the procedure that I've been using to evaluate MPEG
cards for Linux.

1) Find a TV tuner card that has on-board MPEG compression.

2) Search the Internet for a v4l driver that supports the
hardware encoding.

3) Donno, never gotten to step three but I'm sure there will
be something good to do next if the day ever comes ;-).

--  bjm