[mythtv] Status of DV support - Changes required to frontend?

[zylantha at iinet.net.au]

I have been reviewing the real possibility of adding DV support as a capture
source (as suggested by Daniel Pittman back in December).  I have the same
setup as him - with an S-Video to Firewire converter capturing the output
from the (DVB encrypted) video stream from Foxtel.

Of all the possible capture devices, I think that DV is possibly going to be
the easiest to implement, as the simple command:

# cp /dev/ieee1394/dv/host0/PAL/in raw.dv

... Will give you  a raw dvvideo/dvaudio file that can be read by ffmpeg as
a source to compress to MPEG or any other format.

I have translated and compiled the original ffmpeg dv1394 code into a
"DV1394Recorder" class based on HDTVRecorder, but have not had a chance to
actually test it yet.

First I have a (hopefully) simple question ... Is the NUV player in the
frontend wholly, partially, or not at all based on the a/v codecs in ffmpeg?
That is, if I write a raw DV file, in a similar manner to the manner above
that can already be read by ffmpeg, will that be recognised by the frontend,
or are we also going to need to specially adapt the frontend to recognise DV
format NUVs (bearing in mind that it already recognises MPEG2 format NUVs)?

If it is the case that the frontend will already recognise the DV files
through ffmpeg origins, then I think full DV support is really just a small
stone's throw away (along with the stunning quality and instantaneous seek
times that come along with it).

Thanks

Denis.