Driver for Asus P7131 and other SAA-based cards ? (was Re: kbtv2 sound saa.c -- And BETA3 available)

Luigi Rizzo luigi at onelab2.iet.unipi.it
Wed Mar 5 09:06:09 UTC 2008


On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 09:43:50AM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> Quoting Luigi Rizzo <luigi at onelab2.iet.unipi.it> (from Wed, 5 Mar 2008  
> 08:04:11 +0100):
> 
> >ok - thanks for all the pointers. I will keep the list posted
> >if i make some progress.
> 
> If someone stumbles by chance upon the programming documentation of a  
> DVB-S2 or even a DVB-S chip, I'm all ears. But I think all digital  
> stuff is locked away because of some legal stuff from holliwood (DRM),  
> even if it is about free TV stations.

As Danny mentioned, there are several DVB boards supported on linux,
and Raaf posted 12-15 months ago a driver for an USB card.

Re. this particular card (and others using similar DVB chips), they
seem to rely on some firmware that must be downloaded to the card
before the digital part is of any use.

This is not a particular problen, as long as you can legally
get a copy of the firmware (which normally comes on a CD with the
board itself).

In terms of device driver support: the linux saa7134 driver has a
lot of code to download the firmware, control tuner, decoder, and various
card configurations.

I am not sure all these things belong in the kernel - they
are not IO or CPU intensive, and it would be a lot more flexible to
handle them through userland programs that issue appropriate IOCTL
to play with the internal i2c bus or card registers.

In this respect, I am leaning towards a userland approach rather
than adding a lot of stuff to the current saa.ko driver

cheers
luigi


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