USB hardware in VM or Linux PVR software

[Joseph Sinclair]

Responses inline delimited with ---

Stephen Wiebelhaus wrote:
> I prefer running Linux, but am stuck with Windoze for certain
> applications, namely a USB TV adapter. It's a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q.
> I've been using it with GB-PVR software for the past year, and have a
> couple hundred hours of shows recorded with that software, which is for
> Windows.
> Are any of the Virtual Machine programs support USB enough for this type
> of application? I know VirtualBox, and VMWare support USB, but I don't
> see online that they have support for less common hardware, mainly USB
> drives.
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If the USB device is dedicated to the guest while it's running, then USB support, in general, is whatever the guest O/S supports.
If the USB is proxy-passthrough (that is, the host recognizes the device, then passes it off to the guest), then support is whatever the host (Linux) supports.
In either case, the speeds may be a bit low and most full virtualization systems (e.g. KVM, Virtualbox, VMWare) have issues with I/O performance and occasional twilighting (the VM may pause for several seconds) that can interfere with realtime services like recording Video.
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> Are there any Linux based PVR software that would support the Hauppauge
> WinTV-HVR-950Q?
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Not sure, have you looked at MythTV?
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 Would that program be able to import/view MKV files?
> Actually they are x264 video and mp3 audio inside an MKV container.
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MKV is an open container, so good there.  Most Linux distributions handle h.264 video and MP3 audio just fine.
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> The GB-PVR software stores all the program descriptions in a file
> database, which I suppose I could live without that information.
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Depending on the file format, this may be recoverable/migratable, pull the database into Linux and try to open it with sqlite3 or a text editor (might be SQLite or XML), if that doesn't work you might do some google searching for software to interpret/migrate the data.
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> 
> Thanks,
> Stephen
> 


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