[mythtv-users] Channel change misses 20% of the time, can I do USB to USB?

Peter VanDerWal peter at vanderwal.us
Wed Jul 23 08:38:12 UTC 2008


> Is it possible to just run it through my parallel port?  I'm not using
> that for anything, and it seems simpler.

It's possible, but not simple.  Parallel and serial ports are very different.

You'd have to build and adapter and rewrite the software.

Basically you'd have to write a custom kernel serial driver for a couple
pins on the parallel port.   Normal serial drivers just throw a whole byte
of data at the serial port and let the hardware take care of sending it
out one bit at a time.  You'd have to write software that holds the bytes
of data, chops it up, and then sends it out a bit at a time (plus adding
start and stop bits) to one of the pins on the parallel port. At the same
time it would have to monitor another pin (continuously) and collect the
bits and put them back together into bytes.

I wrote similar code for this 25 years ago (different type of processor so
it won't work here), it was a pain and I didn't have to worry about making
it into a kernel driver or daemon that can run in the background.



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list