TV4Mac is a proof-of-concept that demonstrates how support for USB TV receivers on MacOS could be implemented with minimal effort by leveraging existing open source solutions.

It consists of two parts:

1. A series of patches against webcamd 3.13.0.5. Webcamd is a compatibility framework that enables various drivers for webcams and TV receivers from the Linux kernel to be used as user-space drivers on FreeBSD. My patches allow webcamd to be built on MacOS as a shared library.
2. A series of patches against tvheadend (git revision d9dd70b1). Tvheadend is a TV server that exposes a standardized interface for tuning, streaming, and recording of live TV. My patches port tvheadend to MacOS (at the time of development, an official port was not yet available) and make it use webcamd for communication with the hardware.

The patches are distributed under the same license as the code that is being modified.

In theory, TV4Mac supports all TV receiver hardware for which a driver is available in the mainline Linux kernel, provided that it is connected via USB and supports at least one digital TV standard. In practice, TV4Mac has only been tested with a generic DVB-T stick using the RTL2832U chipset. The code has not been tested on any recent version of MacOS and may not even compile any more.

Build instructions:

1. Install dependencies (assuming MacPorts): sudo port install bsdmake gpatch libusb
2. Download the webcamd source code from http://www.selasky.org/hans_petter/distfiles/webcamd-3.13.0.5.tar.bz2 and apply the patches.
3. Run bsdmake in the webcamd source directory: bsdmake patch HAVE_MACOS=1 HAVE_DEBUG=1 CFLAGS=`pkg-config --cflags libusb-1.0` LDFLAGS=`pkg-config --libs libusb-1.0` bsdmake
4. Clone the tvheadend repository (https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend), check out revision d9dd70b1, and apply the patches.
5. In the tvheadend source directory, run: CFLAGS="-I webcamd-3.13.0.5/api" LDFLAGS="-L webcamd-3.13.0.5" PLATFORM=macos ./configure --disable-epoll --enable-kqueue

For testing, you need a media player that supports the HTSP protocol of tvheadend. I used the VLC plugin written by BtbN, available at: https://github.com/BtbN/vlc-htsp-plugin