I have a DVR (Pioneer DVR-660H-S) that in Windows I connect to by plugging in the USB cable between them and then clicking on “Connect PC” on the DVR menu. Once I hit this the DVR allows me to upload audio, video and pictures. Before I click on the “Connect PC” I can see the DVR on my PC but I can’t do anything.
When I connect the DVR in my Linux box (OpenSuSE 13.1) I see the device and it gets reported as a camera. Again, I can’t really do anything with it because I never get prompted by the DVR to click on the “Connect PC” menu item as it remains grayed out.
I don’t know anything about these protocols and have no clue if just installing a little more software would make it all work on Linux or if there’s some proprietary drivers that only exists for Windows.
If anyone has any knowledge on this please let me know. It would be nice to be able to connect through my Linux computers and do file transfers without using my laptop but not necessary.
I am not familiar with this hardware, although I note from searching through an online manual for this model, that it mentions the use of the PTP protocol for communication, so that would explain its detection as a camera-class device.
Which desktop environment are you using? With KDE, you can use the Dolphin file manager with ‘camera:/’ (kamera-kio) to view and manipulate files on PTP devices. (I’m not sure about uploading though.)
Thanks, I think that gave me what I needed. I figured if there is a PTP for pictures there must be one similar for video. The instructions say you can transfer with Windows media player and with a little investigation I found that there was an MTP Media Transfer Protocol. I bet that’s what it is looking for.
With the camera unfortunately I can see on the DVR but I cannot get the areas of it for Video but I bet MTP on Linux will fix that.
I’ll let you know how it goes if I can find a way to get MTP on Linux (assuming I’m right and it’s not there already).
If using KDE, Dolphin provides ‘mtp:/’ (via kio_mtp), however I’ve never had much success with MTP devices. I have heard others having success with CLI methods, including using ‘go-mtpfs’. I’ll follow with interest. Good luck.
Yeah, I know now it’s MTP that the DVR is looking for. I’ll have a look into the go-mtpfs, well, perhaps. I might just give it a miss because part of me is wondering with all these new technologies if the better course is just to live with it for now (use Windows when needed) and focus on putting my own media center together instead whereby eventually the DVR will be rendered obsolete anyway.
The other thing that makes me hesitant is that part of reading on MTP suggested that for devices like DVR’s that they can be looking for DRM which is built into Windows Media Player and I don’t know if dealing with that in built into Linux at all.
What has happened with trying MTP on Linux so far is that I installed a number of MTP programs in the hope that Linux would pick up the MTP part of the DVR but it only ever recognizes the camera protocol. I wonder if Linux is programmed to only see one protocol per device? Who knows!
The other thing that makes me hesitant is that part of reading on MTP suggested that for devices like DVR’s that they can be looking for DRM which is built into Windows Media Player and I don’t know if dealing with that in built into Linux at all.
True.
What has happened with trying MTP on Linux so far is that I installed a number of MTP programs in the hope that Linux would pick up the MTP part of the DVR but it only ever recognizes the camera protocol. I wonder if Linux is programmed to only see one protocol per device? Who knows!
MTP is an extension of the PTP protocol, and is essentially a Microsoft protocol, incorporating a number of technologies including DRM, so it is no surprise that Linux may struggle with a device like this. It is udev that detects the class of the device attached, with the help of various udev rules, so the detection as a ‘camera’ comes from recognising it as a PTP device in the first instance.