Archives | May 2009

A handful of people have asked about current and future support for the SAA7164 features. Digital TV, Remote control, Analog, VBI, FM Radio, Raw Video and Encoded video for NTSC, PAL and SECAM. Firstly, thank you for writing. Second, I thought it would be useful to outline the current status and future roadmap for the driver. Today, the only supported features of the HVR-2200 and the HVR-2250 products are the digital TV inputs. So, if you have access to DVB-T signals in Europe or Australia, or you're lucky enough to be able to receive ATSC or Digital Cable (QAM Annex-B) in North America, Mexico...

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For the last two weeks we've been having spotting networking issues which have impacted Kernel Labs server. We've replaced cabling, switches, routers and finally, on Saturday, the actually cable modem itself. If this has inconvenienced you then I apologize. (Incidentally, thank you to all of the readers who have written) Not being able to host Kernel Labs reliably irks me significantly. Not only for the obvious reasons that prevent us from giving you an excellent service, but, well, read on... You see, I pay a large amount of money to Cablevision each month for 30Mbps/5Mbps pipe, and an agreement...

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Still continuing to clear out my backlog of miscellaneous fixes. Added support for the K-World 2800d (thanks to Paul Thomas for loaning me the hardware and being so patient). While doing that work, I managed to uncover a minor bug in the em28xx audio code (the /dev/audio1 device file was being created even if the device didn't support audio). One thing I had noticed over the last few months is cases where users would report that ATSC scanning worked but tuning did not. In all of these cases, it turned up that the user was connected to a USB 1.1 port (12 Mbps). For ATSC, that means only about...

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Last night I validated hftom's pre-release of Kaffeine 0.8.8, which includes a couple of fixes I submitted back in November for ATSC scanning. If you were getting crashes or scanning was taking an unusually long time, then this release is for you. Now I just have to nag the distro maintainers to pull in the updated release. Also, issued a pull request for the DVB frontend failures that I found while testing the HVR-950q under MythTV. It turns up that Thierry Lelegard actually ran into the issue the same night I did and he has tested the patch I submitted.

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A few days ago I mentioned that I'm trying to track down a hang. Firstly I want to thank the two people that have already responded, I'll be in touch with you very shortly. I also want to mention that I'm running the saa7164-dev tree on my 64bit ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid), 4GB 4 core box without any issues. I can reliably use MythTV to record many overlapping and long running TV shows, I can reliably watch live TV for over 24 hours without any issues. The one hang I have witnessed was using the highly experiment saa7164-buffer tree, which has had zero test time - so this doesn't surprise me. Personally...

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Little did I know that the HVR1110r3 hybrid analog / DVB-T tuner cards are already available for purchase! I have already brought up analog on these boards, but I held back DVB-T support due to an i2c issue that I encountered when trying to communicate with the TDA10048 DVB-T demod. For details about the i2c issue, see my previous post in the saa713x category, entitled, "SAA713X testers wanted" I plan to wait on some feedback on the saa713x i2c quirk fix before I send a pull request for the HVR1110r3 DVB-T support patch. In the meanwhile, you can get your board up and running by using the following...

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I have discovered a bug today in the saa7134 driver inside the function, "saa7134_i2c_xfer" In order to communicate with certain i2c clients on the saa713x i2c bus, a quirk was implemented to prevent failures during i2c read transactions. The quirk forces an i2c write/read to a bogus address that is unlikely to be used by any actual i2c client. However, this quirk is not functioning properly. The reason for the malfunction is that the i2c address chosen to use as the quirk address was 0xfd. The address 0xfd is indeed an i2c address unlikely to be used by any real i2c client, however,...

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As a result of a user's complaint, I finally got some time to get a MythTV server setup so I can do some testing against the 950q. Indeed, there are definitely some problems. I've put together a patch for one issue already, and am continuing to debug. Hopefully over the next few days, I will get it to what I would consider a stable state for both analog and digital modes. One of the challenges with introducing new drivers is that every userland application behaves a little bit different. They make ioctl calls in different order, have different timing characteristics, and have different ways...

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A few days ago I spent a large amount of time re-writing the DMA buffering mechanism inside the saa7164 driver. Partly because: The solution in-place had a number of TODO's remaining and I didn't consider it final code. A hand full of people are still experiencing system hangs. The existing mechanism can potentially lose TV packets under high system latency (theoretically). The second thing I did was to run a series of MythTV live TV tests against this new tree looking for improvements. I saw a full system hang. Doh! I think it's time to focus the entire week on understanding and fixing...

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With the xc5000 work out the door, I've been trying to get caught up on a bunch of smaller work items I've had queued up for a while. Submitted a PULL request for the em28xx isoc handling issue that Jarod Wilson discovered last week. Tested Christophe Thommeret's test release of Kaffeine 0.8.8 (which had some build issues). It will be good to finally get this release into the distributions though, since it has a pretty bad crash in ATSC scanning that I fixed back in November. Continued work on the Terratec Cinergy T XS. There are actually two variants of the same device (with the same USB ID)....

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