DIstros with Plextor ConvertX MPX-M402U Support?
 

I have a Plextor Convertx PX-M402U USB video capture device that's one of the only reasons I need to keep a Windows XP box around.

I've read that this device can work in Linux (including at the link above), but I've had no luck whatsoever getting it to. Web searches turn up lots of dead links, and/or pages with instructions that are out of my depth (the latter usually having comments saying the instructions no longer work).

Plextor itself used to offer Linux support for it, but it's no longer on their site. You can't even get a driver it for for Windows post-XP. Plextor's attitude seems to be that if I want to capture video in anything newer than XP, I should buy a newer one of their products. Nope. I'll never buy another of their products if I can't expect driver support. This device encodes in hardware, not software, so driver support should be relatively simple for the manufacturer, just to transfer data from the device to the computer.

I've tried using it in an XP VM, but haven't been able to get both its USB connection and audio working in the VM. One or the other, occasionally, but never both at once.

Anyway, my bottom-line question: are there any distros out there that have out-of-the-box (or "off-the-install-media") support for this device? Some of the old sites said Myth did, but it didn't work in the one Myth distro I've tried so far tried (Mythbuntu 11.04 64-bit live). I figured I'd ask before going fishing through a bunch more versions.

I'd prefer a live distro, but I wouldn't mind installing a non-live distro on a spare machine to get this working. I'm not, of course, concerned with how old the distro may be as long as the M402U works in it. Security updates aren't even an issue, since I can run it on an offline computer. Devoting a PC to this purpose would beat needing to keep XP around on one!

Thanks,

Zirbert

I don't know this device, but I did a quick search. There seems to be a working driver here: https://home.comcast.net/~bender647/go7007/

In Gentoo there is a package media-tv/wis-go7007.

So it's likely that there is such a package in other distros, too. Otherwise it should be possible to build a package for your distro.

Does this mean that if I install Gentoo (or try the live DVD) and install that package, it might / should work?

I had read that Comcast page with the driver files; trying to figure out which files I needed, what to do with them (i.e., how to apply the multitude of patches), and how to check for kernel compatibility made my head hurt very much. Thanks, though! Maybe if I find an older distro that used the first kernel with a working driver, I'll go back to that page and give it a shot. That (or anything involving the words "compile", "make / install", or "patch") would be a last resort, probably after just continuing to use an old XP box.

I think so. But, like I said before, I don't know this device, so I can't test it.

Maybe you could have a look at the Gentoo ebuild to build a corresponding package for your distro. At least you'll get a clue on how to build a package and which patches you have to apply.