I'm considering using a Raspberry PI as a relay between a USB TV tuner and the LAN. Is there any known reason that wouldn't work?
The problem:
For a year or two, I have been using a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1950 USB TV tuner and MythTV to record and replay over-the-air TV. However, every few months, either the TV tuner or the pvrusb2 module locks up, misses a night's recordings, and requires a reboot of the machine to restore function. Being paranoid as I am, I run RPM package verification, Tripwire, and a couple other things across reboots, so a reboot takes considerable time.
Proposed solution:
The main goal is to isolate the big machine from USB-related lockups.
Plug the USB tuner into a PI and plug the PI into an ethernet switch. (Of course, power to everything...) Using ssh or netcat, send commands to the PI to change channel and start/stop the stream. Using netcat or equivalent, relay the MPEG stream from /dev/video? to a network (TCP or UDP) port. On the master machine, use cron jobs to switch channels and start/stop recording. When recording, copy from a network port to disk. Playback would be by mplayer or equivalent.
I've written the netcat stuff in Java and C++ before I knew netcat existed. I realize I'll (probably) lose EPG access, but a web browser pointed at the TV station's website should take care of that.
I would imagine a PI could handle that data rate without breaking a sweat. Or, is there some limitation in the PI that would prevent this idea from working?
Any other gotchas to watch for?
Thanks.