TV Tuner Card

Danny Pansters danny at ricin.com
Thu Mar 20 00:07:57 UTC 2008


On Thursday 20 March 2008 00:37:21 you wrote:
> > > I will start to work on moving the Empiatech drivers to BSD as soon as
> > > I'm done with the most popular devices for Linux. As for the Hybrid
> > > devices Empia has quite a few new devices in the pipeline, and I'm
> > > going to work for them from next month on.
> > > Although the BSD project will remain a private project for me.
> >
> > Well, thanks for sharing that much :) I reckon you mean that you want to
> > privately develop and at some point make a public release, no?
>
> "in private" - not as a company goal (at least for now), so whoever is
> interested is invited to join.
> I'll try to make all specs available to the participating people. I

That sounds very interesting. I'm not experienced in writing these drivers.

(note to lurkers and alike: much much specialized knowledge needed for that, 
I'm actually reading feedback control systems literature from uni ATM trying 
to understand PLLs better...)

But I do juggle around the commonly available kernel drivers for supported 
analog cards (and a class of webcams) for use with (or without) kbtv. So at 
the very least I may be useful to help tie some knots together. Of course 
with these things it's really imperative that I actually have the HW (I have 
an eyeTV hybrid stick here on my desk looking at me). 

People often don't understand that: you really must have the HW except for 
some general/lucky cases.

> know the mess which is going on in the Linux world (it's also some
> kind of ego game there), since there's nothing real available for BSD
> I can point out to some considerations at least.

Whether a unification on kernel(-mod) level like v4l is doable or desirable or 
not is up to debate, but I think not, IMHO v4l is better avoided on freebsd 
even if some compat thingies exist, if only for performance and driver 
simplicity. Just provide sane ioctls that can do the common things. I think 
you and I are pretty much on the same page there.

I browsed the cx88 code on your site a little while ago, but only glanced 
through it. Looked interesting, but I got the impression that to try and 
build something, one would first need to build (port) other existing linux 
kernel mods.

Anyway, I very much welcome such an initiative and will likely participate one 
way or the other. Be prepared for stupid questions!

Dan




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