[mythtv-users] Plextor M402U or TV402U: anybody gone there?

Nathan Lutchansky lutchann-mythtvusers at litech.org
Mon May 23 01:50:33 UTC 2005


On Sun, May 22, 2005 at 06:28:59PM -0400, Chris Taylor wrote:
> I've searched this forum, but have seen very little discussion of the
> Plextor TV402U or M402U USB devices used for MythTV capture. Is anyone
> doing this?

Well, I have one (of several) that I use with MythTV, but since I wrote 
the driver that shouldn't be surprising.

> Any success or horror stories? Tips?

It works pretty well, as long as you connect it to a USB2 port.  The
biggest factor to keep in mind is that the GO7007 (the compression chip in
the Plextor TV402U and M402U, as well as the Lifeview TV Walker Ultra and
some other devices) can't do bitrate control as well as software codecs
generally do.  This means higher bitrates are required to get decent
quality, so expect to run between 1500kbps and 3000kbps depending on how
picky you are.  I run at 1500kbps but there are definitely artifacts in 
high-motion scenes.

The weirdest thing about using the TV402U is that Myth isn't very good at
seeking to keyframes in a stream recorded from a GO7007-based device, but
Jack Porter just posted a patch today to mythtv-dev to fix this.  MythTV
apparently assumes the GOP size is fixed and that's not valid with these
devices.  -Nathan
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