Category | 801e

In response to ongoing issues with the IR support for dib0700 and firmware 1.20, I spent most of yesterday refactoring the code. When firmware 1.20 was introduced, the dib0700 switched from a polling model using a USB control message, to the messages being delivered on a USB bulk pipe. The code I originally added would do a blocking read on the pipe with a 50ms timeout. Because the dvb-usb-remote code makes use of the global workqueue, this resulted in the global workqueue being blocked 50% of the time. Also, the synchronous urb_bulk_msg() call would burn excess CPU time (reflected as an abnormal...

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Tonight I finally fixed the last Pinnacle 800i issue and issued a PULL request to Mauro for the xc5000 improvements. If you're reading this because you're looking for the firmware, you can find it here: http://kernellabs.com/firmware/xc5000/ Now that we have legal redistribution rights, I'll be working on getting this firmware into the various distributions so that users have a true "plug-and-play" experience. Thanks go out to all the users who were kind enough to test the beta releases, as well as to Xceive for providing documentation and firmware that we are allowed to redistribute.

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For those of you who might be reading this blog because of an interest in developments on the HVR-950q or the Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro 801e, you might want to check the linux-media mailing list. Tonight I announced a beta release of the xc5000 changes I have been working on since last August. Here are the highlights: Power management is now properly supported - no more sucking up your laptop battery and burning your fingers on the tuner's f-connector when the device is idle (can be disabled with the "no_poweroff" modprobe option). Faster tuning - average 10x improvement in time to lock. Average...

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Had Tuesday off from work. Spent a couple of hours writing code at a coffee house for a nice change in scenery. Issued a PULL request for the HVR-950q regression, and did more xc5000 merge work. Spent most of yesterday trying to figure out why my Pinnacle 801e successfully found 24 channels in a Kaffeine scan before the xc5000 power management changes, and why it only got 11-14 channels with the new changes. It turns up I uncovered a race condition in the dvb core in the kernel, which caused the tuning request to not be forwarded to the tuner. All you needed was a dumb channel scanner that kept...

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