Archives | February 2010

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...

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Been a few days since I've posted an update. Here's a brief summary of things that have been going on in the last week: Progress continued on improving em28xx analog quality. I isolated a problem with chroma AGC in the saa7115, and am working on a fix now. I nailed down most of the analog problems being reported against the HVR-950q under MythTV. Posted a tree with fixes and solicited testers to try it out before submitting it upstream. I finally plugged in my HVR-1800 and took a quick look at the analog support situation under MythTV. It falls down pretty hard with the current v4l-dvb...

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I finally found a few hours to sit down and debug the issue people were reporting where switching back and forth between analog and digital modes under MythTV would intermittently fail with the hvr-950q. It turns up there were a couple of race conditions related to the power management of the chip. http://kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/hvr-950q-pmfixes/ There was also a neat bug where the first tuning request after switching from analog mode back to digital would *always* get dropped on the floor. This would cause users to see the first tuning request fail, or there would be cases where...

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Over the last few nights, I finally got a MythTV box setup that I could use for some testing of the HVR-950q. I did some work a few months ago to basically get the analog support working, but there were some reports of problems related to switching back and forth between analog and digital mode. After adding some debugging to the driver, I found basically three classes of problems: 1. The power management on the au8522 was setup such that the chip would get completely powered down when switching modes. Essentially what would happen is when switching from analog to digital mode, the v4l stack...

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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...

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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...

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