Category | pctv systems

The PCTV 340e is one of those unfortunate situations that I (Devin Heitmueller) personally take alot of criticism over. About two years ago I bootstrapped the driver, got it working with the hardware, but then never got around to cleaning up the code enough to get it upstream. This has resulted in the HG tree I created to fall behind current kernels, as well as people being frustrated that the work isn't available in the upstream kernel where they wouldn't have to recompile my driver every time they do a kernel update. While I generally strive to get my changes upstream so that they help out the maximum...

---

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/),...

---

After sitting in a public KernelLabs tree for almost 13 months, I finally got around to merging the Micronas DRX-D driver upstream, so now DVB support for the PCTV 330e and HVR-900 R2 are in the upstream kernel (for 2.6.40). So if you've been using the KernelLabs HG tree (which required considerable modification to work with recent kernels), it is no longer an issue and you should either wait for 2.6.40 to be released or use the main LinuxTV media_build tree as opposed to the tree hosted on KernelLabs. Instructions for installing the LinuxTV media_build tree can be found in the LinuxTV wiki. Thanks...

---

On this fine Independence Day, the PCTV 80e declares independence from the tyranny of Windows. Ok, apologies to anyone from the U.K. for my quirky American sense of humor. Seriously though, Trident Microsystems finally agreed to allow the DRX-J code to be released under a BSD license. This means that we can finally release a driver for the PCTV 80e. http://www.kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/v4l-dvb-80e The ATSC support has been tested. Haven't had a chance to burn in the ClearQAM support. And there's a bunch of cleanup work required before it can be submitted upstream. But it does...

---

When suffering from insomnia, some people count sheep. Others watch television. I ported Ralph Metzler's drx-d driver into the kernel and finally debugged the issues required to get the HVR-900R2 and PCTV 330e digital support working. I know many people have been waiting a long time for this, and I am happy to announce that we've got a tree setup which can be merged into the upstream kernel, as well as firmware which can be legally redistributed. Testers are welcome to try the following hg tree: http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/v4l-dvb-drxd To build: hg clone http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/v4l-dvb-drxd cd...

---

I finally got a chance to do some testing with the PCTV 74e, using the GPL reference driver that Abilis provided. I'm happy to report that at least our initial testing shows that it works out of the box! Testers are welcome to try the following hg tree: http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/v4l-dvb-as102 To build: hg clone http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/v4l-dvb-as102 cd v4l-dvb-as102 make make install reboot Note, under Ubuntu if you receive errors about not being able to compile the firedtv driver, open "v4l/.config" and change the firedtv=m to be firedtv=n. You...

---

I spent the last few days working on some basic quality problems with the KWorld 2800d (an em2860/saa7113 design). It would seem that I uncovered a bug that was introduced almost four years ago which would have resulted in reduced quality for all saa7113 based products. I'm also working on a couple of formatting bugs on the em28xx. I took a bit of time this evening and started looking at the code that Abilis provided for the as102. The chip in question is used in the PCTV 74e (otherwise known as the picoStick). PCTV Systems pushed for the code's release under the GPL, and they deserve the credit...

---

I want to share an experience with you all, since everybody loves to watch a train wreck. As developers, we like to think that the state of the LinuxTV project is continuously improving. Then I have days like yesterday.... I wanted to build myself a MythTV box for personal use. Since my goal is to use this "in production", I figured I would pick a PCI based tuner that had mature driver support. I also assumed that this would minimize the likelihood of me running into trouble. I ended up choosing the PCTV 800i, which is a cx88 card that uses the xc5000 tuner and s5h1409 demodulator. It also...

---

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...

---

We received a good bit of feedback in the last 24 hours from users trying out the PCTV 340e driver, and I am happy to say that 100% of it has been positive. There were a few issues with new users not familiar with compiling v4l-dvb from source code, but everybody who has tried it so far has reported success. That said, I want to take this opportunity to thank a few parties: Lars Forseth, for loaning me a PCTV 340e Solo board for initial testing. Our friends at Xceive for providing support on the xc4000, in addition to providing licensing to freely redistribute the firmware (we will be working...

---