Arnljot.com

Tv tuners and Java (Hauppauge, Pinnacle, Cinergy…)

Posted on September 15th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: java.

An idea came to me yesterday while at JavaZone.

So instead of sleeping through another speech, I sat down in a sofa with my laptop and started reading up on JMF.

What initially struck me was how little documentation that’s out there. Hardly any examples, and little implementations. I found however one guy in UK who’d about a year ago made a simple proof of concept using his Hauppauge card, but it was flawed.

And I also found one guy who’d made something using his webcam - close but no cigar.

So today I e-mailed Hauppauge, Pinnacle and Cinergy with a question on how to implement java support in JMF for their cards.

This is an aproximation of the e-mails I sent them:

Hi

I’m a javadeveloper who’s the proud owner of a [product name here] card.

And as a Javadeveloper I like to play around with things, and I’ve been looking into JMF for Java, and I’m working on a proof of concept application that plays video and shows streams from my Webcam.

My goal however is to make an application that will use my TV Card and let me watch tv channels.

But I’m having a problem.

1. The card doesn’t show up in the jmf registry. Only the “Microsoft WDM Image Capture”, how do I identify my card which I think is WDM capable?
2. When I’ve connected to it, how do I tune channels? I can’t see how to access that part of the WDM API through the JMF API.

My ideal goal is to create an (SENSORED ;)). But right now I’m having a really hard time finding any examples or documentation on how to access tv cards with java.

I really hope that your developers/techs can take some time out to look at this and point me to some relevant info

Thanks, and kind regards.

It was close to impossible to find a sensible e-mail for Pinnacle. Hard to reach seems to be their credo. But now we’ll just have to lean back and see how this goes.

I’ll keep you posted on who of these fine companies that find it in their hearts to respond (and what!) to a idependent developer

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