[mythtv] Controlling an r5000hd recorder from MythTV

[Andrew Mahone]

On 7/15/05, Michael Chmilar <chmilar at acm.org> wrote:
> If the details of the communication protocol and remuxing
> algorithm are available, I am willing to look at writing a
> linux driver for the r5000hd. However, I am not interested
> in reverse engineering anything.

I don't want to play reverse engineer either.  Any developer here
who's looked at code I've submitted would probably agree that that's
getting me in way over my head. :)  I've already emailed them, and I
plan to do so again once I read up on libusb enough to figure out if I
can handle working with it.  I'd suggest anybody else who's interested
send a polite email about getting the protocol and muxing format - if
we can demux it, I don't believe using libavformat to remux it will be
difficult.

> But there is interest from me! :-) I am doing it for myself. I
> will make my scripts and setup available to anyone else who wants
> to use them. If no one else cares, so be it.

Well, I'm interested in getting *some* sort of HD satellite recorder,
but I want MythTV to talk to it directly.  I was suggesting that you
might get more help from other developers if it's done the "right"
way.  Then again, nobody else has really spoken up yet, so maybe
nobody else is interested at all.

> Writing a driver is a lot more work than writing a couple of
> Perl scripts and figuring out how to get MythTV to execute them.

I'm not entirely sure that's the case.  If the XP software can act as
a pass-through filter that provides D-VHS to MythTV, that would be
easiest - don't we already have support for external scripts for
tuning?  If you have to have the XP box pipe it back over the network
or something similar, then you're probably getting into territory
that's not much better than a user-space driver.

If you can get it to work with a filter on the XP box, and an external
tuner script in Myth, would you be willing to put in a little work
testing the results of efforts at direct communication with the
R-5000HD?  The extra computer could do as a band-aid for a wound that
we'd like to stitch up later...
-- 
Andrew Mahone
andrew DOT mahone AT gmail DOT com