Hey there! It’s been a while since I posted anything on the Kernel Labs blog, but we’ve been diligently working away at various projects. A few things probably worth noting: A while back I did a bunch of VLC improvements, which finally went into the upstream VLC a couple of months ago. I actually made… Read More
Author: Devin Heitmueller
VLC Video4Linux VBI Support Submitted Upstream
Last year I did some work related to EIA-608 closed captioning support for VLC. This basically broke down into two projects: 1. Providing support to VLC to support reading CC data from the /dev/vbiX Video4Linux2 device node. 2. Improving the rendering of the captions to be more consistent with the official specification. While I was… Read More
HDPVRCapture and Colossus
Most people are unaware of this, but Kernel Labs isn’t just a Linux shop. We actually do a fair bit of work under OSX as well. In fact, Steven Toth created the very popular HDPVRCapture application prior to the founding of Kernel Labs. Aside from the copyright notice, most people are unaware that HDPVRCapture is… Read More
Public Service Announcement
In addition to writing Linux drivers, I’ve done quite a bit of work with hardware in my time, including a variety of tuner products. I realize that those devices in general do run a bit warm, but this is largely just a byproduct of the nature of how tuners work. This ambitious user though felt… Read More
HVR-950q patches submitted upstream!
After a rather large bug hunt, I’ve finally submitted the HVR-950q patches upstream. In the end, we created 24 patches addressing a ton of longstanding bugs: au8522: fix intermittent lockup of analog video decoder au8522: Fix off-by-one in SNR table for QAM256 au8522: properly recover from the au8522 delivering misaligned TS streams au0828: Make the… Read More
Even more HVR-950q fixes….
Continued debugging has produced another dozen fixes for the HVR-950q. Most of these are low-probability failure conditions (race conditions, etc). However take a bunch of 1/1000 chance items together and you’re likely to hit one of them once in a while… A couple of noteworthy changes: Firmware load time has been sped up to 2.9… Read More
A Quick Primer on Intermediate Frequencies
If you’ve ever had to poke at a DVB driver under Linux, you’ll notice that the configuration for the demodulator and tuner refer to an “IF”. For example, with the xc5000 driver, there is a mandatory parameter called “if_khz” which has to be provided when the driver is initialized. What is an IF, and what… Read More
A whole pile of HVR-950q fixes
I finally spent the day and gathered up all the various patches I had kicking around for the HVR-950q. They can be found here: http://git.kernellabs.com/?p=dheitmueller/cx23885_fixes.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/950q_fixes This includes the longstanding bug at startup that would cause the xc5000 to not properly bind on the digital side, a rather nasty case that hangs the analog video decoder… Read More
Call for testers: HVR-1800/1250/1255 analog support
Well, that was painful. After a full day working with the various cards, I managed to get all of them working. A couple of caveats: The analog tuner on the HVR-1250 isn’t supported yet. The composite and s-video inputs are working but the mt2131 driver doesn’t have the required support for tuning to analog stations…. Read More
HVR-18×0 testing….
Ever wonder why it’s so common for somebody to check in a change to make some new product work, causing a regression in the tuner that *you* have? Well, here’s why: [lightbox title=”HVR-18×0 testing” href=”../../blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/cxboards1.jpg”][/lightbox] All these boards use the exact same driver, despite the fact that they have different core chips and only some… Read More