Saturday, January 20, 2007

"How Stuff Works" on the PS3

Found a nice page on how the PS3 works at "How Stuff Works".
Its http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/playstation-three.htm.

It has some nice pictures of the processor itself, with neat eye candy when discussing the PS3 GPU RSX "Reality Synthesize". You should check it out .. if nothing else but to seen the impressive graphics.

Keep in mind that until Sony or a third party creates libraries optimized for the cell (and drivers for the GPU) ... the Linux side of life won't be all that impressive. This is why I believe the currently working MythTV frontends on PS3 are a little slow / choppy. Frame buffering .. although useful as an easy first port .. is hardly efficient.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

USB TV Tuner + PS3 + MythTV

Red Marine gave me another great link
http://ps3.qj.net/MythTV-on-your-PS3/pg/49/aid/79651

Quoted Text from PS3.QJ.NET

"It was only a matter of time before someone tried a USB TV Tuner and successfully put together a working set of drivers for it. And that someone would be Takeshi Yaegashi who has been successful in patching the Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U's Linux drivers to work properly on the PS3. The problem was that the original GO7007 Video4Linux2 drivers didn't run properly on a 32bit userland/64bit kernel environment.

The released patches will patch the GO7007 Video4Linux2 drivers and the Addon CD to improve compatibility with the said environment, which is common on all PS3 Linux distros. What you'll have to do is patch the drivers, then patch the Addon CD file and finally compile the kernel given in the Addon CD. If this sounds a bit difficult, you can wait for distros to appear with this patches built in.

I would expect Gentoo to be the first with the patches, seeing how they're already thinking of including MythTV on the Gentoo Live CD. If you do understand the consequences and want to go ahead with this, download the patches, the new Addon CD, patch both of them, and then use the new customised kernel with your distro. Expect a thorough how-to soon!"