Simple HDTV viewer?

[David Kramer]

John Abreau wrote:
> I've found that mplayer plays everything I've thrown at it. I haven't tried
> any HDTV yet, but it works great with my Hauppage WinTV PVR USB2.
> I would expect it to work with the HDTV model as well. I've only tested
> the unit to make sure it works; eventually I intend to set up MythTV to
> use it for real.

I use MythTV, but the video files it saves (from the output of my 
Hauppauge PVR-350) are regular MPEG files I can play with mplayer, xine, 
vlc, whatever.

In fact, when I want to capture video from outside MythTV, I just
cat /dev/video > myfile.mpg

> Mplayer doesn't change channels,  and I had difficulty finding something
> else to do that effectively. In the end, I used xawtv to generate a text
> file containing channel frequencies, then wrote a shell script around it
> that pokes the appropriate value into /sys/class/pvrusb2/... for the
> channel I want.

ivtv (http://ivtvdriver.org/) for my PVR-350 comes with a program to 
change channels, inputs, outputs, resolution. cropping, etc.  My 
solution to this problem, and the problem of the encrypted channels, is 
to continue to use the cable box to change channels, and leave the card 
on channel 3.  I use an IR blaster (actually I use a fancy computerized 
IR transceiver, but lirc-based blasters work fine) to change the channel 
on the cable box.

I did a presentation on this (and a bunch of other home automation 
stuff) for BLU a few years ago.  Before I set up MythTV, I had a cable 
box and two VCRs controlled by my IR transceiver, and all my TV 
recording was controlled by my crontab file, which contained the 
commands to start and stop each recording and change channels.

I wrote the software to talk to the IR transceiver myself, and gave it 
to the manufacturer in exchange for a discount on their hardware.  They 
only had Windows software at the time, so I wrote a much better one for 
Linux that had chaining macros and sequences, etc.

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