[mythtvnz] mythtv and sky uhf

[Jon Waite]

You want the good news or the bad news ?

Good news - VMWare works fine as a front-end, on a sufficiently powerful
machine anyway, I've run it under XP to have a 'genuine' frontend available
for testing. Unfortunately the VMWare video driver isn't the best and
struggles with video playback (at least on my system). Keep meaning to try
it again with VMWare workstation beta 6 and see if things have improved any.

Bad news - VMWare 'guests' have no access *at all* to any PCI cards in your
system. They won't be able to even see that you've got capture cards
installed. It would be *theoretically* possible to do what you're attempting
with a USB tuner (as iirc USB 2.0 support made it into VMWare beta 6).

-----Original Message-----

As it happens, I am thinking about setting up VMware on my Myth box so that
I can install M$ to "Test" (The length of the Super 14 _should_ be
enough) the possibility of using the hvc application to decode the UHF
signal, then feed the video output back into a myth tuner for recording as
normal. Unless I can get hvc to output a mpg file, I believe that I will
have to use 2 tv tuners and the video card looped together to get it to work
though. (Makes available PCI slots a premium.) Will have to also look into
using VNC to control the virtual machines running these operating systems
for channel changing etc...
At this stage, I have not got past the thinking stage, and downloading
VMware, as I will need to get a new capture card, with the correct chipset.
I'll also need to get a better box to run it all on, as I think that my
Duron 800 that I use as a dedicated backend (among other things) now wont
cope running hvc & windows on top of it.

Has anybody used VMWare & Myth before?

Neil