[Fredynight]

a more realistic alternative to a usb adapter is to stream recoded video to xbmc over the network direct from a (hacked) tivo or replaytv standalone box, sure this is a much expensive alternative but there is already other open source projects (coded in c/c++) that can do this from a pc with linux or win32 so porting that code, there are even applications that can take full control over all tivo or replaytv functions. duo is already working on getting xbmp to stream recorded video from a tivo, once he got the streaming part working he will probebly move over to remote contreol of the same tivo from xbmp's gui. i' sure that if works fine in xbmp duo will port that feature over to xbmc, ...i do not however think that anyone of the developers in the official xbmp/xbmc team own a replaytv box so someone else would have to code that (or buy the xbmc dev/s one.)

could it be possible to record directly to xbox using tsreader ( and a dvb-s card, twinhan 1020 in my case) and is streaming server? i know that for now we can only change channel on the same transponder, but who know in the future...

i can pause live tv now, so i imagine that the strem is buffered, so it should be simple to record it on the xbox

[gilsas]

hi,

good news: freevo has already been ported to the xbox. it's just a first try, but usable anyway. it already supports the xbox controller and the dvd remote. a lot of usb tv card are already supported. they're preparing a distribution only featuring what's needed for freevo, as to say some kind of stand-alone distribution, based on a linux kernek though. in addition, the pvr features provided by some cards (hauppauge wintv pvr usb) are also supported... this should allow to connect the xbox to any video output like sat. receiver or so ! ...gonna consider buying one of those for xmas !


http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/multimedia.html
http://www.gueux.net/modules/news/articl...oryid=1744 (in french, sorry...)
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/

[snoop244]

i'm gonna reply to d7o3g4q's four options (see his post up this thread).  i think his questions put it pretty clearly.  i feel strongly that option 4 is the right way to go.  streaming from a pc makes a lot more sense.  it assumes we all have pcs, which is a safe assumption.  there is an effort underway under the xbmp project to capture a windows media 9 stream and redirect it through xns to the xbox.  i'm not sure how far along they are, but it's worth watching.  while i think mpeg 2 would be a better choice over windows media 9, i think this project is headed in the right direction.

i don't favor having the xbox capture through the usb because it just doesn't have the horsepower.  i don't have the hauppauge usb capture device, but if memory serves, it gets pretty poor ratings on http://www.dvdrhelp.com .  a couple gentooxers have got freevo running with usb 1.1 capture devices.  i know it runs on linux in this case, but if you want to get their input on performance, hop over to their forum and ask around.  i got a mythtv pvr running on the xbox on top of gentoox; very cool.  worked pretty good, but the os was a bit heavy and it dropped a few frames.  mythtv, unlike freevo, works with a linux backend capture server.  i much prefer this approach as it doesn't limit you to usb 1.1.  if xbmc along with a streaming server on a pc can function as a more efficient layer than gentoox/mythtv, then i think this can work pretty well.

by the way, if you have a linux box running, and want to pick up a cheap tv capture card, mythtv already has an xbox pvr frontend that apparently runs pretty well on top of a very lightweight linux kernel.  you will need to run mythtv backend on the linux box.

snoop

[gilsas]

hi,

i'm not that sure that the xbox is not powerfull enough... specially if you're using a pvr card which encodes the video stream in real time... in this case recording just consist in forwarding the mpeg2 stream from usb to the hdd. as far as i known, those cards only send mpegx stream to the pc(xbox), even when watching tv so a mpegx decompression is needed. talking about mpeg2 decompression (from the usb pvr card), does the nvidia chip have a hardwired motion compensation unit ?

despite using a stream server on a local pc could constitute an interesting solution, it cancels the main interest of having a xbox as to say : you don't have to switch on your pc, to run the streaming application... and so on, and so on.

[syntaxx_error]

hi,

good news: freevo has already been ported to the xbox. it's just a first try, but usable anyway. it already supports the xbox controller and the dvd remote. a lot of usb tv card are already supported. they're preparing a distribution only featuring what's needed for freevo, as to say some kind of stand-alone distribution, based on a linux kernek though. in addition, the pvr features provided by some cards (hauppauge wintv pvr usb) are also supported... this should allow to connect the xbox to any video output like sat. receiver or so ! ...gonna consider buying one of those for xmas !


http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/multimedia.html
http://www.gueux.net/modules/news/articl...oryid=1744 (in french, sorry...)
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/

great !!!!! the dream comes true !   ..just have to buy a hauppauge win tv pvr usb (with mpeg2 hardware compression systems) and voilà !

but for the moment you need to install a linux distri on your xbox to run it.

it seems that the xbox freevo team plan to make a stand alone .xbe application to run freevo :

- create a lightweight distribution on cd or as mechassault savegame.

- people who have never worked with linux before (a large part of the xbox-linux audience) should be able to use it without support

http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/multimedia.html

wait & see

[ToeCutter]

it would be great if you could record the videos and tv you stream to the xbox's harddrive, like recording as its playing!

or, you could copy them over ftp in a mere fraction of actual play time?

nah, this will never happen. i sure don't want to see frodo working on a feature that would offer only minimal functionality. usb 1.1 is too slow for high quality video capture. most usb 1.1 cap cards only capture at 320x240, 30 fps anyway.

with it's limited hardware resources, xbmc is looking more and more like a client application that uses a pc server for most of the heavy lifting. let you pc do all the tricky work, while xbmc just plays it back for you...

[poing]

i think this idea is a waste of time. it would require an external tuner box as many have pointed out, which could only deliver mpeg-1 vcd quality (that's 320x240 or 320x288 resolution) at best because of the limited bandwidth of usb 1.0. also, there would have to be custom support for different capturing devices in order to support changing channels and other operations. you would end up with a lame hackish solution consisting of two boxes connected by wires when you could just go buy a pvr which is made for exactly this task and would do it so much better. it would require a huge amount of development effort which would result in a solution inferior to the cheapest pvr in terms of capabilities and ease of use. the xbox is well suited to being a networked video player (xbmc can play tivo files and replaytv streams), but it cannot make a good video recorder.

[Butcher]

not going to be possible. the disk is too slow.

[bin_jackson]

a 7200 rpm disk to slow? if you first capture it full size and after you stopped recording it goes compressing

[Butcher]

720x480 video at 30 fps requires 41mb/s of bandwidth. xboxes only have udma-33 as standard. so that's more speed than the disk can deliver.

[Butcher]

not to mention we'd also have to use more memory to hold the data while it was copied to disk.

[bin_jackson]

2 bad thankz for the replay

[Gamester17]

anyway, tv-recording from where?, the xbox has no video-in (even though the label on the back of it sais so), do you mean internet?

[SMSOne]

hi there,

are there any libraries available that allow you to hook up a usb tv/sat tuner device to the xbox? if so could this support be included into xbmc so then i could use the xbox to watch tv and sat, freeing up my pc for other tasks, etc. the output from the xbox should also be better than that provided by a pc - component over svhs/scart, etc.

plus it would increase the uses of the tv guide - use it for selecting tv/sat channel and also hopefully implement pvr features, etc.

thanks

james

[majo2000]

i also wish to see that feature !