New port: pvrxxx for Hauppauge PVR150/500

[Dieter]

> > > And how do you propose we write drivers for these proprietary tuners?
> > > Last I checked there were very few digital tuners available, and most
> > > have DRM protection.  Even finding cards which have linux drivers is quite
> > > difficult!
> > 
> > How do the penguins write drivers?
> 
> That's my point-- there are few HD drivers around, compared to SD.

If the tuner can output SD it can output HD.  Perhaps you mean
digital vs. analog.

Compare the number of digital tuners that Linux supports to the
number BSD supports.  The penguins are getting them written somehow.

> > The HD3000
> > specifically promises to not look at it.  I haven't seen any other tuner
> > mention it.
> 
> The HD3000 is no longer available, only the HD5500 is:
> 	http://www.pchdtv.com/
> AFAICT this card only works with terrestrial broadcasts (ACST).  So yeah,
> it works for about 70% of broadcast stations and about 50% of the shows I
> like to watch.  Also the HD5500 doesn't have composite/audio input, so
> you'll also need to buy an analog card if you have older video equipment
> you wish to use.. (e.g. VCRs-- did I just say that?)

I haven't studied the HD5500 in detail, but the HD3000 has analog inputs
(s-video & composite, audio) so you can feed it from an analog camcorder
or whatever.  In addition to broadcast ATSC it also does cable QAM.  If
the HD5500 doesn't do this, you could look for a HD3000 on ebay.

> > http://www.bttv-gallery.de/
> 
> Most of those are used on analog cards.

lynx -dump http://www.bttv-gallery.de/ | grep -i atsc | wc -l
167
lynx -dump http://www.bttv-gallery.de/ | grep -i ntsc | wc -l
414

Yeah, ntsc has more hits than atsc.  That's still a fair number
of hits for atsc.  Yes, I'm assuming that the number of tuners
is roughly proportional to the number of grep hits, which might
not be the case.

> > > Making linux drivers work in BSD is often nontrivial.
> > 
> > What can be done to make this easier?
> 
> The kernels are so different.  What might help is if someone writes
> wrapper macros & other stubs/shims so fewer #ifdef patches need to be
> applied as patches to the linux sources.  I, for one, am in favor of a set
> of v4l userland shims (not kernel).  It might also help if linux
> developers commented their crazy code more often.  I've run into headaches
> when I've tried porting some linux things over to BSD.  Possibly part of
> the blame lies with the lack of API documentation.

I'd like to see some sort of device driver API so that the same driver could
work on FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Plan9/Linux/...

> > What good is myth without tuners or output?
> 
> There are both tuners and output.

Cool.  Could you point me at the list of BSD supported ATSC tuners, and the
list of BSD supported video output devices with XvMC?

> > Digital tuner support is not just about HD or quality.
> 
> No but that's the primary drive behind digital (that and DRM).

Other countries may vary, but the FCC wants to free up spectrum to sell,
and is using digital to do it.  They dropped the ball technically, but
are ramming it through anyway.  "Follow the money."

Some stations choose to broadcast several SD subchannels rather than
broadcasting HD.

> > There is programming
> > available today on digital broadcasts that is not available on analog
> > broadcasts,
> 
> Possibly, although I've not heard of any.

Many PBS stations have programs on digital that are not broadcast on analog.
Or pretty much any station that uses subchannels.