DVB support

[Tom Evans]

Hi all

I would really like to move my current TV recording machine away from
linux, for several reasons (ZFS and 'not BSD' mainly). The only thing
that is stopping me now is that I don't think any of my preferred TV
devices will work properly.

I have the following DVB cards/sticks atm:

K-World DVB-S 100:
        Conexant 23882 based PCI card [1]

ASUS P7131 Hybrid (DVB-T):
        Phillips/NXP saa7131/3 based PCI card [2]

Freecom DVB-T usb stick:
        Wideview DVB-T stick [3], [4]
        
Of these, I think the only one that will currently work is the Freecom
stick, which has a driver for FreeBSD 6,7 (I don't think it's been
updated to work with the new usb stack). Ironically, this is my least
favoured adapter :)

The other two devices are more interesting. DVB-S would allow me to
access the few Free To Air HD channels in the UK, and the FreeBSD cx88
driver would seem to support at least part of it. I am unsure how I
would proceed to support DVB-S in the FreeBSD cx88 driver [5], as far as
I can tell, all the currently supported cards are DVB-T/ATSC.

The saa7131 card may be supported in analog mode by the FreeBSD saa
driver[6], but that driver is lacking any DVB support at all. Analogue
doesn't interest me :/

I don't yet really know any technical details of how DVB-S tuning
differs from DVB-T (I imagine there must be some difference, at least,
because of the need to control the LNB on satellite), but I'd like to
try and get that working on the cx88 driver. Adding DVB support to the
saa driver would probably take much longer for me to do, but would open
up a lot of potential cards to FreeBSD.

So, my plan of action is like this:

1) Update dvbusb driver to support 8.0 usb
2) Update cx88 driver to support DVB-S
3) Port V4L DVB driver for saa based cards.

(although if I complete 1) and 2), I may not do 3) and just watch some
TV :)

If anyone has any information or pointers they can throw me at to get in
the right direction, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Cheers

Tom


[1] http://lxr.linux.no/linux+*/drivers/media/video/cx88/cx88-cards.c#L992
[2] http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/ASUS_My_Cinema-P7131_Hybrid
[3] http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T_USB_Devices#WideView.2FYakumo.2FHama.2FTyphoon.2FYuan_Boxes_and_Pens
[4] http://raaf.atspace.org/dvbusb/
[5] http://corona.homeunix.net/cx88wiki
[6] http://freebsd.ricin.com/kbtv/