Category | vendors

Ever wonder why it's so common for somebody to check in a change to make some new product work, causing a regression in the tuner that *you* have? Well, here's why: All these boards use the exact same driver, despite the fact that they have different core chips and only some of them have an onboard MPEG encoder. To make matters worse, look at all the different input types: Even getting all the equipment together to do the testing is a PITA. I spent twenty minutes digging through boxes for a RCA L/R audio to 1/8" audio converter. It's trivial to accidentally make a change which...

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Been doing some HVR-950q debugging for the last couple of weeks. Finally getting around to cleanup on some existing patches that haven't gotten upstream, as well as investigating some new reliability problems. Out of concern that one of my problems might be power related, I dug up some hardware I hacked together about four years ago. Q: What does this rig do? It lets you see how much power the device is consuming? In the second photo you can see the tuner is drawing 416 milliamps while tuning to an analog channel. Q: Why should I care? Power consumption is a good indicator...

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ViewCast Osprey 260e/460e Linux drivers - Released Today! Kernel Labs are pleased to announce for immediate download, the ViewCast Osprey 260e/460e 32/64bit Linux compatible drivers. Over the next week or so we'll prepare for patch merge into the mainstream LinuxTV repositories. Until then, feel free to download and install. Driver Features: GPL Licensed - Kernel compatible licensing. Video4Linux compatible APIs - Integrates easily with your existing V4L2 applications. GStreamer support - Easily add this to your capture pipeline. ALSA audio support for 48KHz audio capture. Tested...

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Spent this evening digging into how the 0x418, 0x419, 0x420, and 0x421 registers are getting the values which cause video corruption. Just as a sanity check I dropped in the HVR-1850 that Steven was kind enough to loan me, and confirmed that the problem doesn't occur there. This also allowed me to dump out the register state for the 1850 board? Why is this useful? Because there were two likely possibilities as to why the 1800 was broken and the 1850 worked: The code path in the driver that initializes the HVR-1800 is somehow different, resulting in the register state being programmed...

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When we last left off, we had reproduced the basic behavior that users reported, using the stock command line tools such as v4l2-ctl and "mplayer /dev/video1". Now we'll talk a bit about the debugging process. To give some context, let's look at a quick diagram showing the various parts of the device: (click to enlarge) For starters, let's now look at what the actual user sees after running the following commands: v4l2-ctl -d 1 -f 62.25 --set-fmt-video=width=720,height=480,pixelformat=mpeg mplayer /dev/video1 The video feed itself is a set of colorbars, a well known reference...

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As a result of numerous users reporting that their HVR-1800 didn't work in analog mode, I finally got some time tonight to dig into the situation. If you don't care about the details, the short answer is I'm working on it and be patient. If you want to get some insight into the gory debugging process, keep reading... Over the next few blog posts, I'll be walking through the typical debugging process. I don't actually know what the actual problem(s) are at this point, so this is a chance for those of you at home to play along. Here's what we do know: Users have reported a variety of different...

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ViewCast Osprey 820e Linux drivers - Released Today! Are you looking for a dual channel 1080p60 video capture card, with an open source Linux driver and GStreamer support right out of the box? Good news, look no further. Kernel Labs are pleased to announce for immediate download, the ViewCast Osprey 820e 32/64bit Linux compatible driver. Driver Features: GPL Licensed - Kernel compatible licensing. Video4Linux compatible APIs - Integrates easily with your existing V4L2 applications. Flexible driver - A large selection of supported frame-rates and resolutions, from SD to HD. GStreamer...

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As of the release of Linux Kernel 3.1, Hauppauge's WinTV-Aero-m is fully supported for use with both ATSC and DVB-T, using the new MFE framework within dvb-usb to represent two frontends on a single DVB adapter. This makes the Aero-m the first semi-worldwide terrestrial digital television broadcast receiver to be supported under Linux. The device is built of two LG broadcast demodulators and a MaxLinear SoC. The first LG demodulator, LG DT3305, has been well supported in Linux for ATSC ever since I released it a few years ago. I've written a new driver to support the other LG demodulator,...

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After quite some time of talking about it, we finally got around to getting the analog support for the HVR-1850 submitted upstream. Support for all things analog is present and tested on all the various input types: the MPEG encoder, raw capture, analog audio. This patch series also includes a fix for a long-standing regression in the HVR-1800 as well. http://git.kernellabs.com/?p=stoth/cx23885-hvr1850-fixups.git Users are free to try it building from the above git tree, or they can wait a few days for it to be merged into the upstream linux-media tree. The HVR-1850 is a really nice...

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It's been a while since we've had a blog post, so I figured it would be a good time for an update as to some things going on. We're continuing to work in a number of areas, although in some cases things are moving along "behind the scenes" and are less visible to the public. First, let's talk about the HVR-950q.... As a result of some consulting we did in the last month, I spent *alot* of time digging into the tuning behavior for the HVR-950q. This included finding several bugs which explain some of the "sometimes tuning just fails" type behavior. These are the sorts of things that only...

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