[clug] Freevo experiences

Antony Wuth ajw at pobox.com
Tue May 6 10:08:54 EST 2003


Brad Hards (bhards at bigpond.net.au) wrote:

> I'm looking at setting up a Freevo style config, and wondered if anyone had 
> good/bad experiences with TV input and output cards (especially anything from 
> local suppliers). Also interested if anyone has had success with particular 
> remote control designs.

On TV cards, I have found that just about all the cards I see are based
on the bt878 chipset (or bt848 if its older) Interestingly the different
manufactures seem to pick and choose tuners across batches (ie the same
card comes with different tuners at times) basically I have always
managed to get a bt878 based card to work. As far as I have found there
seems to be little difference between them.

I currently use mencoder (from the mplayer package) to record & mplayer
to playback, mplayer has support for everything I use (or conceivably
could use) including flexible input & output options.

For IR I use a (dumb) serial dongle of my own design, it is roughly
based on a few different designs freely available on the 'net. The
Software it uses in lirc (http://www.lirc.org/) As a bonus you can get
the dongle to transmit to control your other devices. I currently have a
few of the devices being tested & am willing to either send you the
PCB pattern, sell you a PCB or sell you a complete device should that be
easier for you.

Hope that helps

Antony


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