[mythtv-users] I got my Ceton InfiniTV 4 working in 0.24-fixes (compiled with custom code)

[Ronald Frazier]

>> I even managed to do something really cool in the process...I don't
>> actually have my Ceton card installed in this mythbuntu box, yet I'm
>> watching TV off it.
>
> You do realise that mythtv does this natively, don't you? All you need is a
> slave back end installed in the box that holds the Ceton card. You don't even
> have to have storage in it.

You must not have realized the context of what I was discussing...I
was talking about a master backend recording from a remote device
without involving mythtv in the process. I was testing the ability for
my patches to work on a mythbuntu system for Tom. He's not gonna have
access to my master backend. He's gonna have the card installed in his
mythbuntu system, so that's what I need to test. The only issue is
that I didn't have the time/opportunity to take my entire system down,
move the card physically into the dev box, and debug everything for
the test.

So my utility basically simulates the card being present in the local
system. There is a character device node under /dev that, when you
read from it locally, it actually retrieves its content from the
corresponding /dev entry on a remote machine. So you can simply go to
a shell and type "cat /dev/mydevice > file1.mpg". Behind the scenes,
it will dynamically open a connection to the remote machine, open
/dev/mydevice on that machine, and stream the data back to the local
server. When you close /dev/mydevice locally, it closes /dev/mydevice
on the remote machine and disconnects.

This will also be useful for me for setting up a dev machine, so I can
do some programming on a full mythtv system that is completely
independent of my production system (it doesn't even need to be
running the same myth protocol version), but shares the capture card.
Basically, I set it up to use the least used tuner, and then before I
do my work, I make sure that tuner doesn't have anything scheduled for
that evening and will be idle (so I don't interrupt a recording). I've
done this sort of thing with the HDHR before, but it's a little more
difficult to find a time when there's a free tuner when there was only
2 of them to pick from.

Another way it would be useful...if you wanted to run your myth
backend inside a virtual machine. The virtual machine doesn't have
access to the PCIe card (well, not yet anyway...though there was a
post here recently about a future version of either virtualbox or
vmware being able to pass through a PCIe card), so with this method,
you could access the host's card "remotely" from within the VM.

-- 
Ron Frazier