[pvrusb2] First Impressions with a Hauppauge WInTV HVR-950

[Michael Krufky]

> On 3/18/07, roger <roger at eskimo.com> wrote:
>> I didn't like it for the simple reason there was no choice to use an
>> onboard encoder (ie. Mpeg2 or Divx).  All video/audio encoding is done
>> using the host's cpu resources.  And doing so, requires a 2+ Ghz cpu!
>>
>> Yikes.  (And the tiny device does use it if you're still wondering.)
>>
>>
>> I just hope, Hauppauge is just gearing up to do a HVR style pvrusb2
>> device, and oh yea, pays Mike lots of money to both, manage it's driver
>> and it's front end software. :-)
>>
>> Another item on the wish list would be using a choice of codecs instead
>> of only having an MPEG2 stream.

michael papet wrote:
> How did you get it to work?  Hotplug/UDEV did not recognize it until I found
> some v4l2 drivers that implement the dvb mode plus specific firmware.  The
> NTSC (USA-cable) image was a mess and the autoscan for channels in mythtv
> didn't work either.  I just gave up after that.
>
> I'd like to know if you did something different.  I'm on Debian Etch, with
> an Intel graphics chip that creates some v4l2 issues.
>
> MP

The hvr950 is fully supported in the following tree:

http://linuxtv.org/hg/~mkrufky/hvr950

Beware, that installing this tree will break all devices that use non-xceive
tuners.  ...yes, that means that pvrusb2 is in fact broken in this tree.

The original author of the em28xx / em2880-dvb / xc3028 driver has pulled his
development trees away from linuxtv.org -- Although I added the hvr950 support
to these drivers, I cannot offer any tech support.

This device family is not supported by the mainline kernel, nor will it be
merged anytime soon.

TO ROGER:  The selling point of the hvr950 is atsc support.  Yes, it is capable
of raw analog capture, but the device does not have an mpeg encoder.  It works
fine for watching live analog tv, or digital tv, but it is not meant for
recording analog.  digital recordings, otoh, is a different story.

-Mike

-- 
Michael Krufky