Archives | May 2011

While this is a bit off-topic for a Linux specific blog, I figured it might be of interest to those of you that have a Hauppauge product and for some time have been frustrated that it doesn't work with your Pace DTA. A known limitation of the onboard IR blaster found in many of these products is the inability to blast the XMP protocol which is becoming more and more common in the Digital Terminal Adapters (DTAs) that US based cable companies are giving away as they transition to all-digital networks. For example, it is very common for Comcast to provide these boxes at no charge to existing...

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Hello fellow LinuxTV enthusiasts! I spent yesterday's post talking about API deprecation, and got onto a tangent about quality. For those of you who have a tuner which "generally works, but isn't reliable enough to use in production", I feel your pain. An unfortunately high percentage of the TV tuner products supported at all under Linux tend to have some glaring problems either from a reliability standpoint or in terms of application compatibility. Not sure what I'm talking about? Let's look at a couple of examples: The HVR-12xx and 18xx: these are relatively popular PCIe hybrid tuners...

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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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