[mythtv-users] TiVo (S1) as a MythTV Frontend

[Steve Hodge]

On 2/6/07, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>
> On Feb 6, 2007, at 2:39 AM, David Campbell wrote:
> > Justin Hornsby wrote:
> >> Hey I have a digital watch/washing machine/phone/foobarappliance that
> >> runs Linux.  Does that mean I can run a mythtv frontend on it?
>

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.


> Unless I am missing something with the exception of /some physical
> > way/
> > of displaying the output on a screen there are no hardware
> > restrictions
> > on what myth can run on.
>
> How do you plan to capture video?


Frontends don't require capture capability.

You need a device that has Linux
> drivers available and there is no such thing in a TiVo, nor is there
> any obvious way to connect one or talk to it if you could.


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.

You also need a CPU that can decode your recordings, at least to the
> point where XvMC could handle them, and no TiVo unit has a CPU with
> that much ooomph.


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.

I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's certainly impractical and if
> you could manage it you would have so much invested in time and
> special equipment (surface-mount soldering gear for one) as to make
> it of only intellectual interest.


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.

Steve
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