Category | applications

Last year I did some work related to EIA-608 closed captioning support for VLC. This basically broke down into two projects: 1. Providing support to VLC to support reading CC data from the /dev/vbiX Video4Linux2 device node. 2. Improving the rendering of the captions to be more consistent with the official specification. While I was pretty happy with the outcome, I never got around to get the changes submitted upstream (they were originally done against version 1.1.15). Over the last year, the mainline has continued to evolve, and now the patches no longer apply. Over the last couple of weeks...

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Most people are unaware of this, but Kernel Labs isn't just a Linux shop. We actually do a fair bit of work under OSX as well. In fact, Steven Toth created the very popular HDPVRCapture application prior to the founding of Kernel Labs. Aside from the copyright notice, most people are unaware that HDPVRCapture is a Kernel Labs product. That said, in the future we're going to be providing some more discussion on HDPVRCapture on kernellabs.com, starting with some "behind the scenes" looks into what's we're working on. First off, let's talk about Colossus. The Hauppauge Colossus is a PCIe...

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Sub $80 embedded Linux Development Box So you want a sub $80 embedded Linux system capable of playing back 1080p60 video, has wired ethernet, SATA controller onboard, USB2 ports, with a full cross compiler toolchain? Perhaps you've got an urge to get involved with digital media playback and Linux development? If so, read on. The Hauppauge Media-MVPHD is a consumer friendly digital media player designed to play back movies and music from a USB thumb drive. In simple terms, plug in a USB drive full of your favorite movies, plug the MVPHD into your TV using the provided A/V cable, power up. Use the HDPVR...

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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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After many years of the original V4L API being marked as deprecated, it finally went away in 2.6.38. This is one of those cases where the kernel developers concluded that V4L2 has been the standard for years, that V4L1 has been dead for a long while and it was finally safe to completely remove the support. Except nobody remembered to tell the application developers. Essentially all the apps out there still relied on V4L headers being present, and in some cases the applications were making older V4L calls which did not have V4L2 equivalents. KernelLabs made code changes and released a tvtime...

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Things continue to be busy here at KernelLabs. This week submitted a patch upstream which results in the IR receiver support starting to work on the HVR-1150 and HVR-1120 boards. This was something that several people had been mentioning to me as an issue over the last nine months. Thanks go out to Fernando Laudares Camargos for sponsoring the work that finally got this stuff fixed. Last week we also loaned out a couple of boards to Jarod Wilson to help him do some debugging on the IR support for the cx88 and saa7134 based products. For those of you who don't know Jarod (http://wilsonet.com/),...

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Back in 2008, I added support for ATSC scanning to w_scan, supporting VSB (Terrestrial DTV) und QAM Annex-B (Digital Cable). My patch was merged into the 20080815 release of w_scan. A few months later, the author / maintainer of w_scan added support for specifying a country code on the command line. In the process, he re-wrote a large portion of the code, and ended up breaking VSB support. The last working version of w_scan for ATSC users was the 20081106 release, which I have been using personally for the past few years. I had the urge to take another look at w_scan last night. As it turns...

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Just wanted to give you all a heads up on some stuff we've been working on: Closed captions for the hearing impaired seems to be one of those features that is ignored all too often in Linux TV. Application support is poor, driver support is rarely present. Being a little hard-of-hearing myself, I can appreciate though why this would be important though. In the past KernelLabs has added driver support for em28xx based devices, saa7164 (better known as the HVR-2250) and the HVR-950q, and done a bunch of work on the tvtime application to better support it. Going forward, KernelLabs has been...

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Well, it's been a long time coming, but the kernel folks are finally dropping support for the Video4Linux 1 API in Linux 2.6.38. As a result, applications which depended on the API (such as tvtime) have to change to no longer use the old API. At KernelLabs, tvtime is our "go-to" tool for demonstrating driver functionality to commercial customers, so it made sense for us to do the work to clean up the code. We've wanted to do this for a while, since the V4L1 cruft made the code much more complicated and therefore made testing that much harder. In the end, it only took about an hour to remove...

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Hello all! If anyone is interested in closed captioning support for the HVR-950q, you can get it from the following tree: http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/v4l-dvb-950qvbi Unfortunately, the work exposed a bug in tvtime which prevented it from working, which I fixed here: http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/tvtime But it *is* working with zvbi-ntsc-cc out of the box. Comments welcome, as always. Next stop: HVR-950q quality improvements!

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