[mythtv] Hardware MJPEG support

Igor Izyumin igor at mlug.missouri.edu
Sun Jul 6 14:48:49 EDT 2003


Hello everyone.  Please help me with this difficulty.

I am trying to get MythTV to work with an MJPEG encoder card (Pinnacle 
DC10Plus) in order to run it on a slow computer (700MHz Duron).  It 
seems pretty wasteful to use software compression when inexpensive 
hardware cards are available, so I would like to use this card instead 
of a simple BTTV framegrabber.

The documentation indicates that a similar Matrox card once worked with 
MythTV, but it certainly does not work with my card (though mjpegtools 
utilities work fine).  Though the Matrox card uses the same chipset 
(Zoran ZR36060) and is quite similar, the Pinnacle card does not have a 
tuner.  It's not a problem in my case, since I have to use a cable box 
to watch TV.

I read the documentation, and it includes exactly zero information about 
MJPEG cards other than a brief mention in the introduction.  I did try 
searching on Google and could not find anything useful.  I also spent a 
couple of hours reading the source code, but couldn't figure out whether 
there was working support for hardware MJPEG compression.  My questions:

1) Does MythTV include working support for MJPEG cards?  Do I simply 
have an error somewhere in my configuration?

2) I would be interested in adding or fixing such support.  What parts 
of libmyth or other code would I need to change or add to?  Since there 
is already code in place to support MPEG hardware encoders, it does not 
seem hard to do, but what are the classes that deal with the hardware?  
Would I need to write a class like MpegRecorder or simply hack 
NuppelVideoRecorder a bit?

Thanks for making such a great program.
-- Igor



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list