[mythtv-users] Question -- Attempting MythTV Build with LFS

[Yan-Fa Li]

David Collett wrote:
>>The only PVR system which has DXR3 support is Freevo via FFMPEG.
> 
> Not quite, "VDR" is a very nice PVR project for dvb cards, it can output
> to DXR3 (also via FFMPEG), which works very well.
>

Cool.  I didn't know that, sadly I only have analog cable :(

>>Freevo is somewhat slower because it's written in Python vs compiled C++ 
>>for Myth.
>

This perception was from about 9 months ago, so it may be much quicker 
now.  It was also extremely fragile and required a huge number of 
modules to be installed which made it a pain to set up.  Of course that 
was before I discovered ATRPMs. :)

> 
> I must try Freevo, being a big python fan myself. I like the Freevo
> philosophy. Freevo is just a lightweight gui and is completely dependant
> on other applications such as mplayer for media playback. I wont comment
> on "slowness" except to say... no.. I wont say anything :) In any case,
> hardware requirements should not differ between mythtv -> freevo,
> certainly not because of python :)
>

Not going to get into a Python vs Compiled C++ argument.  I work with 
Java for a living so I know what SLOW is. :D  While Freevo may be light, 
it's dependencies weren't at the time.

> I use mythtv obviously, so dont take the above as 'anti-myth'. Myth
> seems to be more mature atm, and will always be more integrated (at the
> expense of greater complexity). I'm gonna keep one eye on Freevo tho :)
> 
> 
>>The DXR3 support is buggy but it works and has the same 
>>drawback running non mpeg2 video through a PVR-350 does.  You have to 
>>transcode non-mpeg2 on the fly to mpeg2 which is pretty CPU intensive. 
>>The DXR3 guys also don't seem to be going anywhere fast due to a serious 
>>lack of documentation for the chip thanks to the crappy support from 
>>Sigma for open source.
> 

Glad it's working better now.  When I tested it, the display took a long 
time to switch between menu's and live video.  It also seemed to hang. 
I used a DXR3 for 3 years as my main DVD player, so I know the hardware 
output is superb as you can turn off Macrovision.  That's why I was so 
disappointed in Sigma.  I even bought their new card, but it remains 
unused in a draw because of the crap Linux support and the lousy Windows 
client.

> 
> Once I got the module parameters right, I never had a problem with my
> dxr3. TV-out (svideo) quality was much much superior to NVIDIA
> tv-out(svideo). Still useless for mythtv mind you.
> 
> Dave
> 

So you're saying it's snappy now ?  I must dig my DXR3 up again and give 
it a try.  Like I said, when I tried this before, it was pretty slow 
navigating and there was a noticeable second lag between video switching 
and menus.

Thanks

Yan