On 2/6/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Brian Wood</b> <<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Feb 6, 2007, at 2:39 AM, David Campbell wrote:<br>> Justin Hornsby wrote:<br>>> Hey I have a digital watch/washing machine/phone/foobarappliance that<br>>> runs Linux. Does that mean I can run a mythtv frontend on it?
<br></blockquote><div><br>Do you really think it's unreasonable to *ask* if a PVR that runs linux can be used as a frontend for MythTV? Do you also adopt the same attitude when people ask about xboxes, playstations and so on? The only problem with this query is that it's been answered a lot before and the answer is available in obvious places.
<br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> Unless I am missing something with the exception of /some physical<br>> way/
<br>> of displaying the output on a screen there are no hardware<br>> restrictions<br>> on what myth can run on.<br><br>How do you plan to capture video?</blockquote><div> <br>Frontends don't require capture capability.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> You need a device that has Linux<br>drivers available and there is no such thing in a TiVo, nor is there
<br>any obvious way to connect one or talk to it if you could.</blockquote><div> </div>Right, for the TiVo we don't have access to drivers. Of course it *may* be possible to use the drivers that already exist on the machine, or to reverse engineer them. That's some serious work, but hey, there are a group attempting to reverse engineer nVidia's drivers and that is probably of similar difficulty.
<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">You also need a CPU that can decode your recordings, at least to the<br>point where XvMC could handle them, and no TiVo unit has a CPU with
<br>that much ooomph.</blockquote><div><br>It manages to get the data to the display in the native application. That is probably akin to the PVR350 support that Myth has (though it's deprecated). We'd have to do it the same way,
i.e. avoid X, at least for playback. More reverse engineering required.<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's certainly impractical and if
<br>you could manage it you would have so much invested in time and<br>special equipment (surface-mount soldering gear for one) as to make<br>it of only intellectual interest.</blockquote><div><br>No hardware hacking required (beyond what people already comfortably do with the TiVos). You just need to use the existing hardware, rather than being wedded to using X. But it is a huge amount of development for little real gain.
<br></div><br></div>Steve<br><br>