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Date:      Wed, 4 Oct 1995 00:10:52 -0400 (EDT)
From:      bah6f@server.cs.virginia.edu
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: MBone Connection
Message-ID:  <9510040410.AA20892@viper.cs.Virginia.EDU>

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First off, a disclaimer:  I'm not one of the cool guys who is writing
all the code to make it work, I'm just knee-deep in trying to get it
working on my own machine.  I can tell you what has worked for me and
what the developers have told me.  (Perhaps if I do this well, I'll
save them the trouble of replying, so they can keep working on cool
software) :)

Rodolfo Heitor Gevaerd de Faria writes:
->   What are the current available drivers for Audio and Video hardware ?

The only audio card that will do full-duplex audio under FreeBSD is
the GUS.  All other cards are half-duplex, and they might not work.
If you have to use a soundblaster, the best you can hope for is to use
it for your microphone and have the audio played out of the PC
speaker.  Just the thought of that convinced me to buy a GUS.  The GUS
MAX is roughly US$155.  After a few hours of playing with it, I got it
working.  It now works fine.

For video, you have apparently 2 choices.  The Creative Labs Video
Spigot and the Matrox Meteor.  The Video Spigot is no longer
manufactured by Creative Labs, so you will have a hard time finding
one.  I understand that Matrox sells their Meteor cards directly.  The
contact info is in the mail archives.  Just search for "Matrox".

If you want to use some other combination of hardware, you have to
write the drivers yourself (or wait for these guys to write one for
you).

->   Is anyone working on anything that's not in the standard distributions.

Most everything that is useful is in 2.2-current.  A substantial part
of that is also in 2.1-stable.  If you want the latest drivers for the
Matrox and Video Spigot, you'll need to get -current, though.

->   I have read that the best Audio card for Mbone is the GUS.  Is there
-> any other card (Besides PAS or SB) ?

There are other cards that are supported by FreeBSD, but none of them are
full-duplex, like the GUS.  That is why it is the best (only) card for
MBONE stuff.

->   I was thinking about using a Video Blaster RT300, but someone told me
-> that the Video Blaster has some serious problems if you have more than
-> 16Mbytes of RAM. Beside that, I think that there is no one that is working
-> in a device driver for it.

I can't say anything about what it does with 16Mb RAM, but the fact
that there is no driver is enough to convince me to buy something else. :)

If you download the sources for FreeBSD-current and do "make world"
you should get the latest versions of these drivers and you'll be
up-to-date.  Of course, all the standard warnings about running
-current apply.  It's been simple and stable for me so far, but the
machine running it is unused most of the time.

That's what I know.  I think I'm accurate, but I know the experts will
step in if I've made a mistake.

Paco
-- 
Brian "Paco" Hope              Research Assistant, Technical Support Staff
email: paco@virginia.edu                    Department of Computer Science
WWW: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~bah6f/             University of Virginia



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