alannisota at gmail
Feb 22, 2008, 4:55 PM
Post #3 of 6
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1st off, sorry for not threading this properly. I had some mailbox
issues and wasn't able to reply to previous posts.
Anyhow, I have uploaded a patch to Trac, but it isn't ready for anything
other than further testing:
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/4752
Note that the ticket includes:
1) a patch for the kernel ehci module. This is required for all
versions of Linux to date.
2) the firmware for the r5000. The myth patch won't load it, so you
need to use fxload after plugging in the device before starting myth.
3) the myth patch itself. Hopefully it'll apply to SVN.
It has only been tested on a ViP211, but may work with other DishNetwork
STBs with the R5000 mod (if not, it should be easy to fix)
What works:
Recording HD and SD.
Playback of SD
Playback of HD with CoreAVC patch
Channel changing
Power on/off the STB
Detect STB power state.
What doesn't work:
Only 1 R5000 box can be present in the system. I plan to use the R5k
serial number to identify which box to use, thus allowing multiple
R5000s on one system
Any provider other than Dish Network (it's likely that BEV will work too
though). Any provider using DVB type streams should be easy to fix.
DirecTV will require a lot of work, and Cablebox may or may-not require
a lot of work.
Multi-channel audio may or may not work properly. For sure it will be
identified as 'English' regardless of actual language. See below.
Some info:
The channel changing (and power on/off) is controlled much like an IR
blaster. The R5000 is attached to the IR receiver and simulates the
necessary button presses. It is more reliable than an IR blaster, but I
have found it to be pretty sensitive to how fast commands are sent over
USB. I currently use a 400msec delay between presses which seems
sufficient to get reliable recordings.
I ended up writing my own PMT by snooping present PIDs. This works ok
except that (a) I need some heuristics to detect MPEG4 streams, (b) I
don't know how many audio streams are present so I may send a partial
PMT before all audio is found (it waits for at least one audio and one
video), (c) I have no idea what language the audio is in. In the
future, I'll implement a hybrid approach using both a detected PMT and a
generated one which should resolve this.
The R5000 uses a Cypress Ez-USB FX2 board for communication. The
firmware for all R5000 devices appears to be the same, and is loaded at
cold-boot (via the fxload application). If someone had the inclination,
it should be possible to hack the firmware so that the kernel mod isn't
needed, but I'm not familiar enough with the FX2 to do it myself. It
appears to snoop the output of the broadcom decoder, so it should be
completely independent of any firmware updates the network provider
sends down.
All of the commands were determined by snooping the USB in Windows. As
such, I don't really know that I'm doing thisngs in the most efficient
or robust manner. There is no way to use the device via a Windows
emulator in Linux today. wine, qemu, VirtualBox. VMWare all will not
communicate with the device properly (as far as I can tell this is just
because EHCI isn't implemented properly, though I thought VirtualBox had it)
I am using libusb 0.1.12 which doesn't support asynchronous bulk
transfers. Because I needed them, I'm using libusb_augment (which can
be found here: http://www.gaesi.org/~nmct/cvista/cvista/) with some
additional changes. It means that the Myth patch will only work with
libusb 0.1.xx. Using the alpha 1.0 code won't work at all.
Note:
The R5000 is NOT supported by the manufcaturer (nextcom wireless) under
Linux. I'll try to help as much as I can, but I cannot give any
gaurantee, and it is a pretty pricey investment to do with no gaurantee
it'll even work.
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