Questions for the well informed...

[chemdeath]

I have the following question(s) reguarding the LinuxMCE project before a venture an install and kill my functioning windows MCE.

1.  Can the LinuxMCE use my current windows media center infrared control USB unit to it's entirety.  Mainly I ask because I use that same unit's IR output to control my cable box.  I am aware that the controller should work.
2.  Is the LinuxMCE compatible with the new PCHDTV - 5000's cards? (http://www.pchdtv.com)
3.  With that card and my MCE USB IR/In/Out hookup can I have the HD output from my cable box go into the PCHDTV input and get HD resolution AND can LinuxMCE change the channels on my cable box through the IR "bug" from the USB Media Center IR Controller?

Please let me know if you know the answers to any of these questions, and also let me know if I was at all unclear about any of the questions.

Thank You,

Louis J. Landerman

[Keir]

I'm not sure about your questions but if you have a spare hard drive or a seperate partition to install Ubuntu on, it'll install a bootloader at the end so your Windows MCE will still function.

On a sidenote, I'll be seeding the torrent shortly.

[chemdeath]

upon deeper thought I guess it's probably impossible to do what I want with a tuner card becuause I won't have the right inputs.  What I really need to know in addition to the ir blaster question above is if there is a card capable of doing HD video capture from a HD input source (DVI?) that will "act" as a tv tuner card to linuxmce.

[webpaul1]

There are 4 i/r receivers supported in lmce, the first 3 are 'native', meaning the manufacturers provided binary drivers that are linked into lmce.  1) USB UIRT, which I use and works flawlessly.  You don't even need to pause the movie to plug one in, it just works out of the box.  2) Tira and 3) IRTrans, which also are pnp and work out of the box, and I'm told work well.  And 4) anything that LIRC supports, which includes some of the wmce i/r receivers, though not all, and is mostly reverse engineered stuff.  In practice I've found some of the wmce i/r receivers are pnp.  Plug them in and lirc is automatically installed and the receiver starts working.

However, for some reason, the accuracy of the i/r reception on the wmce+lirc is not nearly as good as the usb uirt, or as the wmce receiver under windows.  I know the wmce receiver *can* do a good job because it works well under Windows, and I'm not sure why LIRC isn't so accurate.  It's my understanding that the reason this may be the case is that the 3 i/r receivers lmce supports natively (ie w/out using lirc) have their own circuitry in them to do the i/r decoding and spit out a clean hex code.  Whereas with the wmce receiver, to keep costs down, is a really 'dumb' device and all the logic is in the software, and Windows software does a better job of translating the pulses into i/r codes than lirc.

[ChiefQualakon]

upon deeper thought I guess it's probably impossible to do what I want with a tuner card becuause I won't have the right inputs.  What I really need to know in addition to the ir blaster question above is if there is a card capable of doing HD video capture from a HD input source (DVI?) that will "act" as a tv tuner card to linuxmce.

So what you want is a card that will accept a digital signal, be it DVI, HDMI or VGA, from your cable box and LinuxMCE treat it as a tuner card, and at the same time, have LinuxMCE change the channel on your cable box to whatever channel it's supposed to be on?

If you find one, tell me.  I need the same thing as well.

[smeagol]

As far as I know, there is no affordable device like this available to the general public. People have been looking for the same type of device in order to do capturing from HD sources. Check the Myth forums for previous discussions on this.

[1audio]

Here is an HDMI capture card. Its only $250. But its in a very questionable area legally if its used to capture "protected" content. And the uncompressed HDMI stream will eat hard disks really fast if you can even record it. It doesn't encode to MPEG or H264 so its output to the PC may not be too useful. However if someone figures out how to exploit the card I'll buy one immediately.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

[intrinsic]

Here is an HDMI capture card. Its only $250. But its in a very questionable area legally if its used to capture "protected" content. And the uncompressed HDMI stream will eat hard disks really fast if you can even record it. It doesn't encode to

The card probably isn't capable of capturing "protected" content (i.e. doesn't do HDCP), that would defeat the purpose of the content protection. So you're probably still "up the creek" with respect to the cable box as I imagine it will output any HD signal protected with HDCP (there are ways and means but these are certainly legally questionable.).

[cckrobinson]

I have the following question(s) reguarding the LinuxMCE project before a venture an install and kill my functioning windows MCE.

1.  Can the LinuxMCE use my current windows media center infrared control USB unit to it's entirety.  Mainly I ask because I use that same unit's IR output to control my cable box.  I am aware that the controller should work.

The answer to question #1 is yes.  I installed LMCE and my MCE remote worked beautifully.  The caveat is that I already had the remote configured and working with LIRC and MythTV.  I sort of doubt that it will work out of the box on a fresh install with LMCE.  If you goto mythtv.org and search for "MCE Remote" you will find the how-to page that I followed.

[webpaul1]

>> The answer to question #1 is yes.  I installed LMCE and my MCE remote worked beautifully.  The caveat is that I already had the remote configured and working with LIRC and MythTV.  I sort of doubt that it will work out of the box on a fresh install with LMCE.  If you goto mythtv.org and search for "MCE Remote" you will find the how-to page that I followed.

Yes, it does.  USB UIRT and IRTrans are pnp and work every time.  There's no setup or drivers required (ie support is built in).  Use of Microsoft's i/r receiver works about 50% of the time out of the box with no fiddling, depending on which chip is inside (there are multiple flavors).  However it's not as reliable (I wrote a post on this).