Will USB tuners ever be supported on NAS?

General Discussions
1

Hi,
Can someone advise as to whether it is in Plex’s development roadmap to ever support USB tuners on NAS boxes? My QNAP TS-251+ can serve/share Hauppauge HVR-1950 and Dvico Fusion5HDTV (both USB) tuners to my LAN using VirtualHere. That would seem to indicate that the NAS natively recognizes USB tuners at a hardware/kernel level. I’d just like to know now if there’s even any intent so that I don’t have to waste time waiting around for something that will never happen.

I have yet to find anything that’s even close in function to replace BeyondTV4, and Snapstream stopped development on it over 7 years ago, but it’s still the best DVR app out there. C’mon Plex, show us you can outperform BeyondTV!!

Thanks!

2

I’m not going to make any promises to get your hopes up, but the NAS device OS need to properly support them natively providing the right dev entries, kernel etc. We would certainly like to, but again can’t make any promises

Linux support in general, which most NASs run some type of, is based on Happauges ubuntu support http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/linux.html

3

BigWheel,
Thank you for the reply! If I have Plex Pass, will attached USB tuners at least show up in the Plex Tuner Service log files, even if they’re not supported? Is that a possible way to see if they are natively supported in the QNAP 4.3.3 kernel?
Thanks!

4

SSH’d into my QNAP TS-251+ running QTS 4.3.3 and grabbed a few bits of info. First off, it’s running Linux kernel 4.2.8…

[/] # uname -r
4.2.8

…and it natively recognizes 2 attached USB tuners, an Hauppauge HVR-1950 and DViCO FusionHDTV5 USB Gold.

[/home] # lsusb
Bus 001 Device 009: ID 2040:7501 Hauppauge
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0fe9:d500 DVICO
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 046d:c52f Logitech, Inc. Wireless Mouse M305
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1005:b155 Apacer Technology, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 152e:2571 LG (HLDS)
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1c05:2074
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 1c05:3074
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
[/home] #

Each USB tuner has a coax input for ATSC/NTSC OTA tuner and S-Video and RCA Composite/Audio inputs. The Hauppauge has a built-in IR Blaster for channel changing a Satellite/cable STB.

This box is really nice for an HTPC with its’ small form factor, low power, low noise, and HDMI output. So what do think, could Plex support this for DVR?
Thanks!

5

I cannot make any promises. sorry