So, it has been a while since I updated this… I guess my server has just been running fine. I recently checked and this driver doesn’t work anymore for the latest kernels. More internal changes I guess, I haven’t looked into the details yet…
AFAIK, they don’t manufacture these chips anymore, but there still is working hardware out there, and the only alternative analog grabbers with hardware compression cost more than these grabbers.
Perhaps it’s would be nice to have a libusb version of this driver, which then turns it into a networked recorder that mythtv can use, perhaps just do the same protocol used by the hdhomerun so that it can work without modification for any software that supports that. Then it would not depend so much on the kernel anymore. I think that can work. You would probably lose the option to choose high/low/medium quality for each recording (unless we modify mythtv too), but that would be fine for me.
Then I can more easily upgrade my mythbackend pc (no more drivers…), and I could even stick the USB grabbers into any pc where a mythbackend is not even running, because the grabbers are networked.
I never used libusb, but in theory it should be possible to port this… Just a program that uses libusb to find the device(s), initialize them, and that can start a recording on a given frequency/channel when requested. I wonder how much work that is. Then add a network layer to it that uses the same protocol as the hdhomerun.