[mythtv] Controlling an r5000hd recorder from MythTV

[Andrew Mahone]

On 7/14/05, Michael Chmilar <chmilar at acm.org> wrote:
> Two reasons:
> 
> 1) I am _not_ an experience device driver writer. I have never
> written a device driver.
> 
> 2) I am lazy. To quote from the r5000hd developer (posted on
> avsforum):
> 
> "No, it is not just a raw transport stream coming out, so even if you
> did get Linux to somehow recognize the USB device you would still
> need to make sense of the data and remux into a transport stream (the
> hardest part!) and thats what the R5000-HD app handles."
> 
> So, it is not just a matter of writing a USB driver. You also have to
> reverse engineer the raw data stream so it can be remuxed into a
> transport stream, which, apparently, is "the hardest part".
> 
> As it is, the XP-hosted driver and app work flawlessly.
> 
> I want to have one integrated frontend for all TV sources. MythTV is
> the best solution I have seen (on any platform) for that. The r5000hd
> XP software requires a mouse (and occasionally a keyboard) when you
> are scheduling, and a separate playback app like zoomplayer (they do
> have a simple playback app, but it doesn't have many features).
> 
> Mike

I'm not sure the remux part is really going to be as hard as they make
it out to be, or that a driver is as hard as you think.  If they will
tell us what to say to their device and what to expect from it, it
should be easy to get rolling with libusb.  I also don't think you'll
see much interest from the user or developer communities in a setup
that requires an extra computer - for that, we could go with
169time.com, which would likely work with existing D-VHS support in
MythTV.  I'm only guessing, though - maybe everybody doesn't care
about satellite HD, or doesn't mind a cumbersome and expensive
solution.
-- 
Andrew Mahone
andrew DOT mahone AT gmail DOT com