[mythtv-users] Current wisdom on PVR-150/250/350/500

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Wed Apr 19 02:35:34 UTC 2006


On Apr 18, 2006, at 8:02 PM, Chris wrote:

> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> Non-free software and drivers defeats the whole purpose of using  
>> Linux.
>> That's not really what many people have invested a lot of their time,
>> and money, into.
> Really!  Try playing HDTV in Mythtv without them!


Agreed.

I've been looking at my system and you know what? It is RIDDLED with  
"proprietary binary blobs".

There's one in my BIOS chip, they exist in the microcode in the CPU,  
they are in my SCSI controller. The firmware in my hard drives is NOT  
"open source", even some stuff in our beloved PVRs is "closed source".

My God, it's everywhere. This is terrible !

So why are we picking on the graphics card makers ???

I guess because it resides on OUR ram and hard drives, and not on  
some other device ?

So what, code is code, no matter where it is located. I wish there  
were open-source drivers for video cards, but if people want to get  
silly, like not allowing "non-GPL" stuff to link into the kernel,  
then we would have to get rid of a lot of things besides our picture  
makers.


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