Video Server

[Robert La Ferla]

Rich Braun wrote:
> At some point in the future I want to build a terabyte server to house my home
> videos to play back on the main TV set or the household PCs--either recorded
> off the air or with my HD 720x1280 camcorder; someday I'd love to rip my DVDs
> the way I did my CDs.  So far I haven't seen a suitable Linux software for
> building this:  sort of a high-def Tivo with a back-end database that I can
> tinker with.
>
> Has anyone else here embarked on a project like this?  Any success?
>   
I have some of the components for this but I have had little success 
with the cornerstone of the project: MythTV.  I now realize that it was 
my choice of TV tuner card (pcHDTV HD-3000) that caused me no end of 
grief.  I had wanted a card that could do it all (analog CATV and 
DVB/ATSC/HDTV) but the drivers are not quite there.  I have to run an 
audio cable from the card to the "mic in" just get sound out of it 
because their driver doesn't extract the audio signal digitally.  This 
is mostly Connextant's fault (the chip maker) because they don't reveal 
certain details of their chip design to open source developers.  I am 
hoping to try again with a Hauppauge PVR-500 tuner card.  The PVR-500 
does hardware encoding so it will work better but this means no advanced 
software deinterlacing like TomsMoComp or Greedy2Frame.  I'm also 
searching for a Linux-based DVB-s solution for DishNetwork satellite but 
I haven't found anything yet.  I am hoping that once my DVR is working, 
I can expand my HTPC to include a DVD library on a RAID disc.  I own a 
few hundred dvds so this would help me manage the collection.

BTW - It would be nice if someone could give a talk on DVB and V4L at a 
future meeting.  The technology is changing and improving rapidly so 
it's hard to follow.