How to add support for (an 'unknown') TV tuner?

[Danny Pansters]

On Thursday 05 June 2008 20:51:54 Fritz Katz wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   I have a "Encore ENL-TV-FM" video tuner card that I'd like to use on my
> FreeBSD system.
>
> 	# btsetup
> 	btsetup> show
> 	BKTR - BrookTree/Conexant BT8x8 based cards
>         ===============================================
> 	BKTR MODULE LOADED........... No
> 	BKTR DEVICE PERMISSIONS...... Not OK
>
> 	SAA - Philips SAA713x based cards
>         ===============================================
> 	SAA MODULE LOADED............ Yes
> 	SAA DEVICE PERMISSIONS....... OK
> 	SAA CAPTURE CHIP............. Philips SAA7133
> 	SAA TV CARD.................. Unknown card/vendor
> 	SAA TUNER TYPE............... Philips, NTSC M/N
>
>   Looking at 'dmesg' I see both the Philips-SAA7133 and the 'Unknown'
> appear on the I2C bus:
>
> 	saa0: <Philips SAA7133 AV broadcast decoder> mem 0xf9fff800-0xf9ffffff irq
> 16 at device 9.0 on pci1 iicbus0: <SAA713x I2C Controller> on saa0
> 	iicbus0: <unknown card> at addr 0
> 	iic0: <I2C generic I/O> on iicbus0
> 	saa0: [ITHREAD]
>
>   It shows up as 'Unknown card/vendor' but the part number on the board is:
> TNF-5835-MFF (inside tuner can:
>        TNF-9835-A3,
>        Texas_Inst-SN761677-TV-VCR_Tuner
>        Philips-TDA9809-FM_Modulator
>        Philips-TDA7040-stereo-decoder)
>   It's manufactured by 'Shenzhen Tena' in Guangdong China
>
>   A search of the bttv gallery shows it is very common:
>   ( http://www.bttv-gallery.de/ ):
>         TVGo A11 WDM TVTuner
> 	PhTVTune
> 	Norwood Micro Tv
> 	Sabrent SBT-TVFM
> 	Mercury Ez View TV Tuner
> 	Powercolor MTV878
> 	Pixelview PlayTV
>         (... more ...)
>
>   So, it would be worthwhile to start a project to add support for this and
> similar tuners.  I have hardware specs with I2C commands from 'Shenzhen
> Tena'.
>
>   Also, I've heard that BrookTree/Conexant is no longer supplying parts for
> TV-card manufacturers -- I couldn't find any TV-Tuners which have the old
> cards in stock which the bktr driver supports at my local electronics
> superstore (Fry's in California).  Anyway, in the USA broadcasts are
> switching over to ATSC-HD-DTV and old NTSC broadcasts are being phased out
> (by Feb. 2009). New tuners are coming to market everyday.  We need to
> expand the tuner selection available for FreeBSD multimedia.
>
>   Anyone want to work with me on a project to add drivers for those new,
> unsupported tuners to FreeBSD?
>
> Regards,
> -- Fritz Katz
>    frtzkatz (at) yahoo.com
 
Are you the same as Reid Judd <reid_judd at yahoo.com> who emailed me earlier?

It seems that for someone in eastern-europe using a similat "TNF" tuner, the 
audio can be made to work in kbtv2 if the sau device gets opened and closed 
whenever used, so when it's not kept open. I'm going to just put that in 1.97 
(RC4 upcoming). May work too for NTSC with this sort of tuner.

As far as the video goes, make sure you select ntsc as video standard, if the 
image still shows extra data instead of just the active video let me know.

Obviously, no feedback == no improvement.


Cheers,

Dan