[mythtv] WinTV PVR-250 (hardware mpeg encoder)

[kevin thayer]

Cool,

If i'm hearing you correctly, the card control
interface is the main portion of the v4l driver
interface that MythTV uses. Sounds like most of the
video handling is custom. 

Am I correct in assuming an ioctl is the preferred
method of accessing the mpg2 stream? Or would a (char
device? ie /dev/video1) work for grabbing the data?

Seems that if this new recorder class is only tasked
with breaking the mpg2 stream into frames and feeding
that into the ringbuffer, then i suppose reading from
a /dev/video1 type device would work, the main
drawback being less control (?) and being different
from the rest of the codebase (assuming ioctl)

Call me lazy if you want ;)
-tmk

=============
The new recorder class would be very lightweight,
basically just grabbing the encoded data from the card
and pushing it to the ringbuffer class.  

The new player class would just be a .mpg file format
parser (could probably even just use ffmpeg's
libavformat), tying into the existing decoder/video 
display/osd stuff.  

As for what the driver would need for mythtv, the best
thing, IMO, would be for it to use the same v4l ioctls
for changing channels and inputs, etc, as everything
else does.  

The actual grabber stuff isn't as necessary to work in
the same fashion as the normal v4l code (like how the
mjpeg stuff has an extended ioctl set for grabbing the
compressed frames), since that's probably 
going to be custom code, anyway.

Isaac

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