An idea for Firewire channel changing in 64 bit Windows

[wayner]

Here's an idea.

Windows 10 is getting better and better support for Linux with Windows Subsystem for Linux, they now have WSL2 which is integrating Linux even more into Win10. This is also allows you to run Dockers on Windows that is supposed to be more full featured than ever before. (Which breaks up another possibility of runnings the docker version of SageTV under Windows, but that is a topic for another post)

There are drivers for Linux to allow you to use Firewire to change channels. Many of us are able to use firewire channel changing in Linux today on unRAID and perhaps other flavours of Linux.

Here's my theory-

Would it be possible to set up a process that uses ssh or some similar process for 64 Bit SageTV for Windows to call Ubuntu or some other Linux distro running on WSL to change channels? I guess this would require some sort of Passthrough of the Firewire device to WSL, but if that is possible then shouldn't this work? And it would all be on one PC with no special software or hardware required and this is much simpler than running full on VMs.

[wayner]

To answer one of the questions I raised, it looks like there is not currently hardware support for devices like USB and Firewire, but that may come in the future:

Can I access the GPU in WSL 2? Are there plans to increase hardware support?
We have released support for accessing the GPU inside of WSL 2 distros! This means you can now use WSL for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science scenarios more easily when big data sets are involved. Check out the get started with GPU support tutorial. As of right now WSL 2 does not include serial support, or USB device support. We are investigating the best way to add these features.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq