[mythtv] Controlling an r5000hd recorder from MythTV

[Andrew Mahone]

On 7/14/05, J. Donavan Stanley <jdonavan at jdonavan.net> wrote:
> Michael Chmilar wrote:
> 
> >The r5000hd must be hosted on a Windows XP machine. The maker
> >supplies a USB driver, a "recorder" app, and a "scheduler" app. The
> >r5000hd cannot be hosted on linux, as there is no linux USB driver.
> >
> >
> >
> Given the above and:
> 
> >I am an experienced software developer
> >
> 
> 
> Why not write real drivers?
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... I just posted about this a few days ago, and nobody seemed
interested.  I've only started looking into libusb, but it should be
pretty easy.  There's a generic firmware loader for the USB gadget
chip they use.  We should just need to extract the firmware from the
Windows drivers (if they think the community is serious about this, we
can hopefully get the firmware as a separate file on their web site),
and send it to the device with fxload.  After that point, we'll need
some help from them or some reverse engineering to find out how to
control and read streams from it.

I emailed them a few days ago, and they don't seem interested in doing
any actual work, but I think they will provide enough documentation to
get it running with a libusb-based user-space driver.  I don't feel
entirely good about the community needing to do all of the work to
create a new market for their product, but it's also a huge benefit to
MythTV users in areas where DirecTV and Dish are the only way to get
the subscription channels.

-- 
Andrew Mahone
andrew DOT mahone AT gmail DOT com