[clug] cheap pvr

[Angus Gratton]

Hal wrote on 22/03/10 2:21 AM:
> I Wonder if it would work on MIPS.

What kind of MIPS device are you thinking of? In my experience, the
CPU overhead of saving a DVB stream to disk is low, but the I/O
demands are reasonable.

I know my MIPS router (Asus WL-500gP) is fairly limited in I/O
bandwidth over USB, and although I haven't tried I think it would
struggle reading a DVB-T stream from the USB tuner and then saving to
the USB disk in realtime. To give you an idea of the bandwidth
requirements, I think the entire DVB-T transport stream (as read from
the tuner card) can be up to 23Mbps in Australia. Individual channel
bitrates in the range of 10-12Mbps for HD, 2-6Mbps for SD. Even if you
can't save it, you might be able to restream it straight back out over
the network, though.

You piqued my interest and I had a quick look on the OpenWRT site.
Lots of people talking about using USB DVB adapters, but I couldn't
find any confirmed success stories.


On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 7:44 AM, steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> wrote:
> Anyone on the list used/know about BDA devices?

As I understand it, BDA is a driver layer between the hardware and
Windows video layers. So the vendor provides a device-specific driver
that implements BDA's API, and then any application that uses "BDA"
can access it. So it, by itself, is not really of any use to Linux.
:(.

Here's an almost identical (supposedly also Linux-compatible) tuner
for a few cents cheaper:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8309

FWIW, I picked up a different (now discontinued) cheapie DVB tuner
from DealExtreme a few years ago, and it worked as well as a much more
expensive AverMedia one that I had.


One thing to watch with Dealextreme is that they sometimes silently
swap unavailable products for "equivalent" ones, which can mean
swapping a Linux-compatible chipset for a non-Linux-compatible one.
You'll often see it being complained about in a particular product's
Forum/Review section.

Hth.

- Angus