[mythtv-users] TBS 6301 replacement for HDPVR?

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 2:36 PM, Dan Wilga
<mythtv-users2 at dwilga-linux1.amherst.edu> wrote:
> On 12/29/17 1:08 PM, Rajil Saraswat wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I came across this HDMI capture card from TBS,
>> https://www.tbsdtv.com/products/tbs6301-hdmi-hd-capture-card.html. Is
>> this an equivalent of Hauppauge colossus card?
>>
>> There are bunch of video on Youtube about this card using it with
>> dvblast and astra. Is this not a dumb HDMI capture card?
>
> Not dumb--it seems to support H.264 encoding, which is a big plus. This same
> company has other products which even do H.265.

So this one is interesting.  It's an ITE HDMI frontend and Fujitsu encoder.

They've got a Linux driver, but it emulates a DVB tuner rather than
the standard V4L2 encoder interface.  Looks like they've wedged in a
bunch of extra controls to configure the encoder, rather than using
the standard V4L2 encoder controls.  They've exposed the scaler, which
is also nice - means you can record an incoming 1080i stream at some
lower resolution if you want it in HD.

In short, it's not going to work out of the box with MythTV since it's
pretending to be a DVB tuner.  MythTV typically expects device of this
nature to represent themselves as V4L2 encoder/capture devices, which
is how the GUI is able to set things like the input to capture on,
bitrate, etc.

>> The most interesting thing seem to be that it supports LPCM audio, so
>> guess it should support multi-channel audio.

Almost certainly not.  Almost all of these devices just do PCM stereo
audio (although in this case the Fujitsu encoder will likely encode it
to something like MP2 or AAC).

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com