Or what to do with free hardware that isn't supported
I received a DATOptic DigiREC from a friend for potential use with a Linux DVR. He told me he knew nothing about the hardware, and that he had lost the software that came with it.
After a bit of research I found the company website for the product. This didn't help me much at all. Searching for "digirec linux" on google turned up someone looking for the chipset it used. I dug further and found that the driver on the website actually references the chipsets used, from eMPIA, as they use the stock eMPIA Windows drivers.
EMVIDEO.INF said it uses the EM27xx or the EM28xx for video. EMAUDIO.INF says it uses the EM2801, EM2821, or the EM2841 for audio. Thus, we are one step closer to answering what hardware it has.
At this point I found VIDEOGlide a Mac OS X application for receiving video from eMPIA devices. Their list of supported devices didn't include the DigiREC, but I tried anyway. I was able to get video working from the S-Video input, but not the RF (which is what we would want for cable TV). I sent the company an email and they updated the website, so hopefully future owners of a DigiREC can have an easier time of it than I.
I didn't want this to only work on my laptop, though. My iBook is not the ideal DVR device for a number of reasons, but my desktop machine is. My desktop is running Ubuntu, and I would ideally like to interface the DigiREC with MythTV.
A quick websearch turned up good news, so now I just needed to make sure it supported the DigiREC.