USB HD and Linux

[Matthew Gillen]

Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 03:51:51AM -0400, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
>> I recently purchased a USB HD device from Amazon.com (Hauppauge).   As I 
>> looked around, some devices claimed to be linux-friendly (like the one I 
>> got).
> 
> That's a little silly, because either a device complies with USB
> Mass Storage Spec or it doesn't. Linux has an appropriate
> generic driver for that.
> 
>> I then began to wonder what makes the device linux-friendly if its 
>> sole function is as a tv tuner.   I know a device driver would need to 
>> talk to it.   I then wondered if any usb tv tuner device might work? 
> 
> No. There's no universal standard for that driver, although
> there is a Linux spec for the software API: Video For Linux, aka
> V4L (and really, V4L2).

It gets even nastier, because even though some video-capture chipsets that
have solid linux (V4L/V4L2) drivers for a pci version, there is no way to use
the usb version (even when it has the same chipset internally).  (note that
sometimes there is a workaround where you can capture the usb commands that
the widows driver uses and play them back via a perl script and the raw usb
device file so that you can start and stop the capture from linux).

Matt

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