[pvrusb2] Maybe what a I really want is a Hauppauge HD PVR!?

[Mike Isely]

On Wed, 14 May 2008, roger wrote:

> http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html
> 
> Any connectivity notes with Linux yet?
> 
> I'm guessing, this is going to be classified as an external hard drive
> with the PVR's operating system within the first partition of the hard
> drive and the storage on the second partition.
> 
> Might be an extremely interesting box if linux users can tinker with it.
> (Much like the famed Linksys WRT54G boxes ;-)
> 

There has been A LOT of chatter on mythtv-users about this.  People are 
salivating over it.  Right now AFAIK, there is no Linux driver for it.  
This is basically an HD-capable hardware-encoding video capture device.  
I would expect a driver for it to look like another V4L device.  However 
I am unaware of any existing available Linux driver right now.

Given that this device is doing HD encoding not SD encoding, then the 
usual cx2341x encoder chip can't be in use here.  It has to be something 
a lot faster - and probably not cheap.  I can envision the pvrusb2 
driver potentially supporting it in the future, but the changes would 
require better abstraction of the cx2341x support in the driver so that 
it can be compartmentalized and replaced with a corresponding driver for 
whatever is inside.  And that's assuming that the control processor is 
still a Cypress FX2 - which is probably a bit too optimistic.

One advantage that the pvrusb2 driver has had is that a lot of the 
different devices out there all share a common ancestor in an apparent 
reference design from Conexant.  Though there are differences between 
say a Hauppauge tuner and a Gotview device, those differences are 
relatively minor so the driver can abstract these things into a table 
and adjust accordingly.  This device probably doesn't fall under that 
umbrella.  (Not that I wouldn't like to take a real shot at this.  But 
we'll see what time will tell.)

  -Mike

-- 

Mike Isely
isely @ pobox (dot) com
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