Archives | December 2009

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...

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In an effort to empty out my backlog of issues, I spent most of last night looking at the Hauppauge Nova-T 500 and the various issues people have reported with regards to the dib0700 1.20 firmware. Now, there are some people who might argue that the breakage is my fault, since I was the developer who pulled in the version 1.20 firmware and made it work (required to address i2c bugs preventing the dib0700 from working with the xc5000 tuner chip). And those people would be correct in doing so. ;-) Let's talk about the issues... The first issue is one related to rebooting. People have...

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I did more work on the tvtime audio today. It's basically working, at least on the HVR-950q: http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/tvtime/ To build: hg clone http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/tvtime/ cd tvtime autoreconf ./configure make src/tvtime At this point, I am recommending running the "src/tvtime" binary directly as opposed to doing a "make install". The "autoreconf" step is required because this is not a tarball, and hence there is no "./configure" like you would normally expect. It also means though that you need autoconf and automake installed. The current...

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I finally got the new DVB generator up and running, and spent the afternoon debugging the PCTV 340e. The digital support is now working! http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/pctv-340e-2/ As always, there are a bunch of caveats: The testing as of this point has been *very* limited. I have basically confirmed that tuning works with tzap/mplayer with 8MHz DVB-T. The code needs a bunch of cleanup before it could go into the mainline. It's also based off a version of the v4l-dvb tree that is several months old and needs to be rebased against the current tip. This means that if you have...

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Things are moving along - last night I issued PULL requests for the em28xx PAL VBI support, as well as some cleanups for the HVR-1600 ALSA support that Mauro asked for. http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/em28xx-pal-vbi-2/ http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/hvr-1600-alsa-2/ I also checked in the patches I referred to last week when doing cx88 testing with tvtime (testing with a PCTV 800i). There is still definitely a problem there with the cx88 VBI implementation that needs to be dug into, but I haven't had time to do it yet. http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/tvtime/ I...

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I have pretty much wrapped up the VBI support under PAL for the em28xx chip. Tested it with a Teletext source in New Zealand last night. It turns up the WSS reference captures I had were malformed, which sent me off on quite a wild goosechase thinking I was improperly interpreting the data stream. Such is life. During my em28xx testing, I setup a box with a cx88 board (a PCTV 800i) so I could compare the VBI waveforms. This prompted me to also try out tvtime with the cx88 while I was at it. It basically works, although the VBI handling is pretty broken. The size of the VBI region provided...

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If you have fond memories of the fabulous LugRadio podcast, like me, then you'll be pleased to hear that my fellow country men Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge have re-formed for a twice weekly audio podcast called... A Shot of Jaq. It's a no-nonsenese look at todays Linux issues in a short and snappy 10 minute format. Everyone can spare time for this... probably. Rating: 4 Stars - Recommended.

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I needed to do some Teletext testing yesterday for a customer, and since I was going to be doing it remotely over SSH, I figured I would build xawtv locally in their environment, since it included a tool called "mtt" which had both an X11 version and a console version. My assumption was that I would download the source, run ./configure (which would not see X11 so it would only build the command-line version of mtt), and everything would be swell. Wow, what a pain. Bear in mind, this is on a *stock* Fedora 11 system. It took me nearly two hours to get it to compile successfully, including...

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Almost two weeks ago we imported tvtime into our source repository. My initial plan was to import in the current CVS, pull in all the distro patches, fixup the VBI, add ALSA audio, and then spin a release. Well, I seem to have gotten a bit stuck on the ALSA audio. It would appear that my attempts to make lipsync work properly, which requires low latency, have exposed bugs in various drivers. My original efforts with the HVR-950 exposed a kernel panic, which Douglas Landgraf was kind enough to offer to debug. To stay on track, I switched over to my HVR-950q, and was seeing a condition where...

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I spent the last couple of nights continuing work on tvtime's audio support. I'm able to playback the audio from the capture device, but I am having problems with underruns. It has actually ended up being a non-trivial exercise delivering audio from a tuner to the sound card with less than 30ms of latency (required to maintain lipsync). The work uncovered a bug in the em28xx-audio module, which Douglas Landgraf volunteered to investigate while I stay focused on tvtime (I sent him code demonstrating the problem last night). I'm also seeing a case on the HVR-950q where there's a roughly 1/4 chance...

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