Create Extigy

[Derek Young]

Creative Labs Extigy, flat out rocks. It is definitely the 
future of pc audio, and I hope that FreeBSD can support it. 
I am willing to volunteer to write the driver, however I just 
wanted some feedback on a few issues. 
 
I ran a USB sniffer on the device, and when you turn it 
about 5200 packets get transmitted. Haha. There is 
definitely a firmware that gets uploaded to it.  
 
Would that prevent it from being part of the FreeBSD dist 
without Creative Labs approval? 
 
We can make it as a port very easily, but do I have the 
right to do that? All I am doing is watching traffic to the 
device and sending it what it needs to work.  
 
I hope that someone who knows what they are talking 
about will enlighten me. Because I don't know jack about 
legal stuff. And I don't want to waste a lot of time on this, 
(cause it will take a lot of time) when I won't be able to 
give anyone my work. 
 
Also, the Extigy has a remote control on it. It has tons of 
features, like volume control. The cool part is that it has 
ways to control DVD playback, audio playback, etc. We 
will need a driver for that also. 
 
Maybe someone should ask 
KDE/Gnome/XMMS/Mplayer/etc what type of interface 
they would want to the OS. I was thinking like a 
/dev/mcontrol as a "Multimedia Control" device. KDE 
could open that up and listen for volume control and stuff 
like that. It would be cool if this wasn't another one of 
those... FreeBSD does it that way and Linux does it this 
way type deals. There is already a /dev/pss that is 
suppose to be a "Programmable Device Interface", what is 
that for? I don't know, there would be more to a Multimedia 
Control than one might think. For example, with the extigy 
you can define if you are using headphones, 2 speakers, 5 
speakers, etc. It will attempt to produce the best sound for 
your setup as possible. You can also say what you want it 
to sound like, an auditorium, a stadium, a small room, a 
live show, etc. 
 
I don't know if those are hardware based things or software 
based things. I will find out with some effort. 
 
Also, when it comes to things like Dolby 5.1 sound and 
such... that is way in the future for BSD, but has anyone 
considered what will take place to make that work? Or 
does it automatically work when you send dolby encoded 
data to /dev/dsp on devices that support it? 
 
I don't know much about this stuff, but I can reverse 
engineer stuff pretty well. I have always wanted a 
computer to control my home sound system, I just have 
never seen a sound card that I was happy with.. 
(Something about the limited space on a PCI card, limited 
power, and tons of interference from the all the parts inside 
your computer) 
 
Thanks 
 
Derek Young 


This message was sent from the free private e-mail service by easy.com, the portal site owned by Stelios and the easyGroup. This email service is available to all members of the public to use for personal reasons only.  Not all subscribers to this e-mail service are representatives of an easyGroup company.