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beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 10:39 am Post subject: Plextor PVR PX-TV402U

I just saw the press release[1] for this thing .... looks freaking sweet. Here's some of the features[2]:

I downloaded the SDK[3] and looked at it, and one thing from the README had me worried / confused:

Quote:

No raw modes are supported, so most Video4Linux2 applications, such as xawtv, will not function.

Could someone translate for me what that means? Would things like mencoder and mythv be able to record using their stream, still? I would imagine they might need a patch to use their hardware encoding, but I have no idea how those things work, so I was hoping someone more informed could help me out, and let me know if I should hold off buying one in the next 30 minutes.

1. http://www.plextor.com/english/news/press/LinuxPVR_pr.htm
2. http://www.plextor.com/english/products/TV402U.htm
3. http://www.plextor.com/english/support/LinuxSDK.htm

Edit: I just bought mine

We'll see what I can get it working.

Also, I asked the same question on the video4linux mailing list, and already got some responses, so you can see the answers there.

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/video4linux-list
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beandog
Developer

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Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:55 pm Post subject:

Just got it in the mail today ... my gosh this thing is awesome. Amazing video, audio, and you just can't beat recording to mpeg4 at 3k bitrate in realtime. _________________ If it ain't broke, tweak it. planet \| packages \| blog \| home

its1louder
n00b
n00b

Joined: 03 Jul 2003
Posts: 51
Location: Santa Barbara CA

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 6:19 pm Post subject:

So, this is a USB part right? You just hotplugged it into yer gentoo pc and it works? anything you have to do? Any software you are running? _________________ These go to eleven.

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 7:52 pm Post subject:

its1louder wrote:

So, this is a USB part right? You just hotplugged it into yer gentoo pc and it works? anything you have to do? Any software you are running?

I had to install a few modules -- usb support in my kernel, along with load firmware support. Plus you download the SDK (see link from first post) to compile even more kernel modules, and a recording program. Load those modules, and their program is the only one right now you can use to record TV or any video in. mplayer, tvtime, etc. won't work. Yet. I'm hoping mythtv will add support for it soon.
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beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:14 pm Post subject:

New wiki entry: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_go7007 That pretty much explains what I had to do. Hope that helps _________________ If it ain't broke, tweak it. planet \| packages \| blog \| home

r3ap3r2004
n00b
n00b

Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Posts: 6

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 8:36 pm Post subject:

I just got mine yesterday. I've configured the kernel, installed the modules from Plextor, and in general have everything configured correctly according to the directions in the readme from Plextor's SDK and from beandog's wiki (as far as I can tell). When I try and use the gorecord application though I get the following error: apps # ./gorecord -frames 1000 capture.avi /dev/video0 is a GO7007SB device at USB address 1-3:1.0 Attempting to determine audio device... Unable to find emulated OSS device node Any idea what I need to do to fix this problem? Thanks in advance. -Chris

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 9:22 pm Post subject:

r3ap3r2004 wrote:

When I try and use the gorecord application though I get the following error:
apps # ./gorecord -frames 1000 capture.avi
/dev/video0 is a GO7007SB device at USB address 1-3:1.0
Attempting to determine audio device...
Unable to find emulated OSS device node

Hmm, my first guess would to be make sure that you have ALSA OSS emulation installed in your kernel.

Do you have the snd_go7007 module loaded? What does lsmod say?
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r3ap3r2004
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Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Posts: 6

Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 11:02 pm Post subject:

beandog wrote:

Hmm, my first guess would to be make sure that you have ALSA OSS emulation installed in your kernel.

Do you have the snd_go7007 module loaded? What does lsmod say?

Yes OSS emulation is installed in the kernel.
I've got snd_go7007 loaded, along with all the other Plextor modules.
I've also loaded snd_pcm_oss and snd_mixer_oss making sure that the oss devices were created.

Output of lsmod:

Code:

Module Size Used by
snd_pcm_oss 50208 0
snd_mixer_oss 19072 1 snd_pcm_oss
wis_sony_tuner 4996 0
wis_uda1342 3844 0
wis_saa7115 5124 0
go7007_usb 10880 0
go7007 44416 4 wis_sony_tuner,wis_uda1342,wis_saa7115,go7007_usb
firmware_class 8960 1 go7007
snd_go7007 6180 1 go7007
i2c_core 19968 5 wis_sony_tuner,wis_uda1342,wis_saa7115,go7007_usb,go7007
yenta_socket 21256 0
rsrc_nonstatic 8576 1 yenta_socket
pcmcia_core 43428 2 yenta_socket,rsrc_nonstatic
nvidia 3917852 14
intel_mch_agp 9360 0
ath_pci 55456 0
ath_rate_onoe 8200 1 ath_pci
ath_rate_amrr 8324 0
wlan_xauth 2432 0
wlan_wep 7040 0
wlan_tkip 12032 0
wlan_ccmp 7552 0
wlan_acl 5120 0
wlan 110940 9 ath_pci,ath_rate_onoe,ath_rate_amrr,wlan_xauth,wlan_wep,wlan_tkip,wlan_ccmp,wlan_acl
ath_hal 148048 2 ath_pci
sr_mod 15140 0

My /dev folder has:

Code:

reaper@reaper1 dev $ ls -l /dev/dsp*
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 9 Mar 24 18:56 /dev/dsp -> sound/dsp
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 10 Mar 24 18:56 /dev/dsp1 -> sound/dsp1

reaper@reaper1 dev $ ls -l /dev/mixer*
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 11 Mar 24 18:56 /dev/mixer -> sound/mixer
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12 Mar 24 18:56 /dev/mixer1 -> sound/mixer1

reaper@reaper1 dev $ ls -l /dev/audio*
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 11 Mar 24 18:56 /dev/audio -> sound/audio
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12 Mar 24 18:56 /dev/audio1 -> sound/audio1

reaper@reaper1 dev $ ls -l /dev/sound
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 ..
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 12 Dec 31 1969 adsp
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 4 Dec 31 1969 audio
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 20 Dec 31 1969 audio1
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 3 Dec 31 1969 dsp
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 19 Dec 31 1969 dsp1
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 0 Dec 31 1969 mixer
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 16 Dec 31 1969 mixer1

reaper@reaper1 dev $ ls -l /dev/snd
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 ..
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 0 Dec 31 1969 controlC0
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 32 Dec 31 1969 controlC1
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 24 Dec 31 1969 pcmC0D0c
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 16 Dec 31 1969 pcmC0D0p
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 25 Dec 31 1969 pcmC0D1c
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 26 Dec 31 1969 pcmC0D2c
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 27 Dec 31 1969 pcmC0D3c
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 20 Dec 31 1969 pcmC0D4p
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 56 Dec 31 1969 pcmC1D0c
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 1 Dec 31 1969 seq
crw------- 1 reaper audio 116, 33 Dec 31 1969 timer

I assume that's all the entries that anyone would need to see out of /dev for this application.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
-Chris

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2005 12:06 am Post subject:

Everything looks okay, and there's only a few other things I can think of to try --- Does it let you record as root? If so, make sure your normal user is in the "audio" and "video" groups and try then. It looks like your oss modules are getting loadad after the plextor ones. Try compiling them into the kernel instead. How are you loading the modules anyway - by coldplug, manually, or are they just detected on boot somehow? Lastly, does gorecrd -adevice /dev/dsp1 <other arguments> work at all? Edit: Just noticed something ... items in /dev/sound are chowned to root:audio while /dev/snd are chowned to reaper:audio. So my suggestion would be try compiling the ALSA OSS settings in the kernel, and then see what happens after a reboot. Edit: nevermind .. I dont think that should matter. not sure. _________________ If it ain't broke, tweak it. planet \| packages \| blog \| home

r3ap3r2004
n00b
n00b

Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Posts: 6

Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2005 9:57 pm Post subject:

beandog wrote:

Everything looks okay, and there's only a few other things I can think of to try ---

Does it let you record as root? If so, make sure your normal user is in the "audio" and "video" groups and try then.

It looks like your oss modules are getting loadad after the plextor ones. Try compiling them into the kernel instead. How are you loading the modules anyway - by coldplug, manually, or are they just detected on boot somehow?

Lastly, does gorecrd -adevice /dev/dsp1 <other arguments> work at all?

Edit: Just noticed something ... items in /dev/sound are chowned to root:audio while /dev/snd are chowned to reaper:audio. So my suggestion would be try compiling the ALSA OSS settings in the kernel, and then see what happens after a reboot.

Edit: nevermind .. I dont think that should matter. not sure.

Took a while to get back to this but here's the update.

It looks like the loading order of the modules is important. When I loaded snd_pcm_oss before I plugged in the PVR then everything worked just fine. I have now built the oss emulation stuff into my kernel to avoid the problem and everything works just fine.

The command:
#gorecord -adevice /dev/dsp1 -frames 1000 capture.avi
doesn't work at all. It just brings up the help menu for gorecord, don't know why. The adevice option is listed as one of the parameters that can be passed, but it doesn't like it for some reason. Doesn't matter too much though since it seems to be working without it now.

Thanks for your help.
-Chris

Chessman
n00b
n00b

Joined: 21 Jan 2004
Posts: 11

Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 1:26 pm Post subject:

I'm new to the whole Mythtv thing and have this Plexor PX-TV402U unit. I have a Gentoo base installation, but didn't know if I should load the drivers for this device before going through the Mythtv install or if I should install Mythtv first. Any advice? Thanks, _________________ Matthew Mactyre

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 4:09 pm Post subject:

MythTV wont work with it at all right now. Not until the drivers work more with video4linux. I'm using mine with freevo, but using the gorecord binary to record TV instead of mencoder.

Edit: *beep* I'm wrong again. According to this interview with Plextor ( see http://machineofthemonth.org/articles/2005/0323/page3.html ):

Quote:

Obviously, the Linux community will work with the SDK to develop further software support. The hope would be to have the product work with Linux PVR software, such as MythTV. If you are familiar with MythTV, do you think it will be technically possible that the ConvertX PX-TV402U could be used with MythTV using Linux?

The development version of MythTV supports the ConvertX devices as of 19 March 2005.

I personally am very skeptical about getting MythTV to work (I've never gotten it working AT ALL), but there's your answer.
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Last edited by beandog on Mon Mar 28, 2005 12:18 pm; edited 1 time in total

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 11:17 am Post subject:

Sweet ... new drivers are out here: http://www.plextor.com/english/support/LinuxSDK.htm v0.94 adds a new flag to gorecord: -duration lets you set the # of seconds to record. Man that's gonna make things a lot easier. As soon as I get time, I'll post howto use this thing with freevo. _________________ If it ain't broke, tweak it. planet \| packages \| blog \| home

r3ap3r2004
n00b
n00b

Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Posts: 6

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 7:28 pm Post subject:

beandog wrote:

Sweet ... new drivers are out here: http://www.plextor.com/english/support/LinuxSDK.htm
v0.94 adds a new flag to gorecord: -duration lets you set the # of seconds to record. Man that's gonna make things a lot easier.

As soon as I get time, I'll post howto use this thing with freevo.

Even more important than the -duration switch is that Non-US tuners are now supported. I have a Japan tuner version and had just finished modifying the SDK code to support it when this version came out. Oh well, good learning experience I guess.

Now to get that beast of MythTV installed. The build keeps failing on my box for some reason.

Going to be trying freevo too so I look forward to your howto.
-Chris

O.T. Your 'Location' says you are from Utah. Where in Utah are you from. I'm from West Jordan, but currently living in Japan.

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 7:46 pm Post subject:

r3ap3r2004 wrote:

Yah I saw that too -- thats awesome.

r3ap3r2004 wrote:

Now to get that beast of MythTV installed. The build keeps failing on my box for some reason.

Good luck man, let me know if you manage it.... I tried the cvs version today, and the Plextor was indeed in the list of tuners, but the mythfrontend crashed on me when I tried to go to the Program Guide.

r3ap3r2004 wrote:

Going to be trying freevo too so I look forward to your howto.

I'll get that going as soon as I get my freevo working ... still having some weird issues with it, like the webserver works half the time. Right now its using 20% memory and its idle.

r3ap3r2004 wrote:

O.T. Your 'Location' says you are from Utah. Where in Utah are you from. I'm from West Jordan, but currently living in Japan.

Heh, I'm in West Jordan too. I just moved here about 3 months ago from Orem. I love it!

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r3ap3r2004
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Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Posts: 6

Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2005 6:05 am Post subject:

Update: I didn't read the fine print in your wiki about the 1GB filesize limit. So, having not paid attention, I attempted to encode 2 1/2 hours worth of video at a high bitrate using the mpeg2-dvd mode. I used an online bitrate calculator to figure out the bitrate I would need to make it all fit on a single 4.3 GB DVD at the highest bitrate possible. Well as soon as I hit the 1GB limit the program exited with a nice error message about exceeding the 1GB limit. :evil:

I thought, man that is a stupid limitation. It should be very easy to code the system to check if it has exceeded the size and open a new file and continue recording rather than just exiting. So into the source code I went again to make the necessary change. About 30 seconds into looking through the code it was time to do my little happy dance. The code to accomplish it was already written, I just needed to use the right command when starting the recording. Too bad that part of the command isn't printed when you do: gorecord -h. Anyway, here is how you exceed the 1GB limit. Keeping in mind your filesize won't be any bigger than 1GB, you will just end up with multiple files. You can then use your DVD authoring software to put all the files on a disk.

When you issue a command such as:

Code:

$ gorecord -input 2 -mode NTSC -tvchan ntsc-cable:21 -format mpeg2 -duration 9600 test.avi

You need to add a %d to the filename. So the previous command would then be:

Code:

$ gorecord -input 2 -mode NTSC -tvchan ntsc-cable:21 -format mpeg2 -duration 9600 test%d.avi

This will cause the code to create a file called test1.avi that will record till it hits 1GB in size. At which point it will create a file test2.avi and continue recording using the second file. This will continue until the recording stops or you run out of disk space. :twisted:

Anyway, hope that helps anyone trying to record something larger than 1GB.

I also finally got MythTV installed and working. NOT!!! with the PX-TV402U though. I started with the standard ebuild for .17. I figured that if I couldn't get it to compile and run I had no chance of getting the CVS version running. Now if I can just get some more time to play with the CVS version to try and get this Plextor working I'll be a happy camper. I also installed Freevo but I haven't had time to even try and configure it yet.

-Chris

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2005 10:22 pm Post subject:

r3ap3r2004 wrote:

Update: I didn't read the fine print in your wiki about the 1GB filesize limit.

Don't feel too bad, I only added that the other day when I found out myself on the v4l mailing list.

r3ap3r2004 wrote:

I just changed MAX_FILE_SIZE to 2 gigs (since most I record are slightly over 1 gig, I'm not too worried) in gorecord.c, and I'm gonna try that. Anything over 2 seems to give an error.

Code:

#define MAX_FILE_SIZE (2*1000*1024*1024) /* Keep files just under 2GB */

Edit: That no workie.

I just found the oddest thing that's been haunting me for a week solid. Ever since I upgraded to 0.94 of the sdk and 2.6.11 of the kernel, my video would luck sucky. It turns out the culprit was mencoder.

I use mencoder to encode the pcm audio to mp3 after each recording. It turns out, whenever I use mp3lame as the oac, it royally screws up the picture -- even though I'm passing -ovc copy! Really weird. lavc as the oac seems to work great, so I'll go back to that one. If's faster anyway.

So, just a heads up -- if you're re-encoding the audio with mencoder, don't use mp3lame.

I'm gonna give MythTV another try. Good luck!

Edit: I got it working after checking out the CVS repository. You can watch TV with it which is pretty cool. I still prefer my freevo for now though, since I have a lot more options with mplayer / mencoder, and I have a few gripes with myth still.
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beandog
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Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 11:11 pm Post subject:

Bah. I had mythtv working the first time I tried it, then I had to go and tweak and break it. Poop. If you get yours working, lemme know your setup for the video card. _________________ If it ain't broke, tweak it. planet \| packages \| blog \| home

r3ap3r2004
n00b
n00b

Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Posts: 6

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 9:44 pm Post subject:

I scrapped the idea of getting this to work with my old laptop. I've since put together a new desktop system to do my encoding. Probably better anyway since I can stuff it full of hard disks now. MythTV version .18 is out now and includes the support for the Plextor, and the ebuild was just added to ~arch too. I had MythTV working great with my PVR-250 on the new system, then decided to upgrade the main hard disk since the one I was using was old and noisy. I tried just dd'ing the disk, but something didn't work right. Since all this machine is doing is running MythTV I figured I might as well just start over and do it right. As soon as I can get everything to finish compiling I'll be giving it a run (I really hate waiting for anything KDE related to compile...QT......). I have a new PVR-500 on the way too. When it gets here I should be able to record 4 shows simultaneously. Let the networks stack all the good shows on the same day at the same time, I'm ready. One thing that messed me up in my original setup though was changing the settings in MythTV on my laptop (at least I thought I was changing the settings on the laptop), but as it turns out since the database was pointing to the desktop machine it was modifying the settings for the desktop. Ended up blowing away all my configuration and had to start over. Oh well, good learning experience I guess. Here's another thread covering some issues people have had with this hardware. Mainly related to Ubuntu, but I figured I would reference it anyway for anyone having problems getting their system to recognize the hardware. I couldn't get mine to work for quite a while, then all of the sudden it started working. I should have paid more attention to each of the changes as I was making them. http://forums.divx.com/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/996105602/m/405108842/p/1 -Chris

superuser
Apprentice

Joined: 14 Mar 2004
Posts: 166
Location: Colorado, Colorado Springs

Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 12:02 pm Post subject:

Is USB 2.0 mandatory or can the TV402U be used via USB 1.1 equally well? Could anyone try this out, please? Does work MythTV finally, now?

tkdfighter
Apprentice

Joined: 14 May 2004
Posts: 271
Location: Bludenz, Austria

Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 6:08 pm Post subject:

USB 1.1: 12MBit/s USB 2.0: 480Mbit/s I think that 1.1 would be just a tad too slow

superuser
Apprentice

Joined: 14 Mar 2004
Posts: 166
Location: Colorado, Colorado Springs

Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 5:41 am Post subject:

No, depends on the input stream, actually. In fact, MPEG-2 is most often viewed and recorded at a stream size no bigger than 6000 kB/s, so we should have quite enough bandwidth remaining, just in case. The question is, whether these 6000 kB/s are sufficient all over the time or not, since we will run into trouble if the device doesn't output a constant stream, but, say, one second run at 20 000 kb/s and the other go down to 2 Mb/s. So no matter I may theoretically work (and I'm pretty sure there also will be differences between the codecs), we'll still end up with someone having to try it out. So, please

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 7:37 pm Post subject:

superuser wrote:

Is USB 2.0 mandatory or can the TV402U be used via USB 1.1 equally well? Could anyone try this out, please?

No, USB 2 is not mandatory. USB 1.1 will work, but the developer notes don't recommend it. YMMV.

Quote:

Does work MythTV finally, now?

Yes, 0.18 added support for it.
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Leikor
Tux's lil' helper

Joined: 04 Sep 2003
Posts: 122

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 12:21 am Post subject:

How well does it work in mythtv? Is it fully supported in this version? What are the caveats of mythtv with this tuner? Leikor

beandog
Developer

Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1777
Location: /usa/utah

Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 12:05 pm Post subject:

Leikor wrote:

How well does it work in mythtv? Is it fully supported in this version? What are the caveats of mythtv with this tuner?

Well, it worked great for me. I don't have my myth setup right now, since its a hassle and there's no time, but when I was using it, everything worked fine. I really liked how you could use the watch TV function on it.

Right now, MythTV is your only option right now under linux if you want to use the Plextor with a PVR, or anything else for that matter. The Plextor SDK comes with a recording program, but it's a demo more than anything, and not reliable since it loses AV sync after about 40 minutes of recording, every time. MythTV never had that problem (as far as I could tell).

I only know of three people who have used it with myth (myself included), so if I were you, I'd look on mythtv-users mailing list for some more help as to what some of the quirks are. I don't really remember having too many. I do remember thinking it worked so well, that I wanted to buy another Plextor.

I hope that helps.
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