DVB-S under FreeBSD

[Konstantin Dimitrov]

are there any work in that direction - support for DVB-S cards under
FreeBSD? it would be great to be able to watch digital TV broadcasts under
FreeBSD.

most DVB-S cards (including new cutting-edge DVB-S2 cards for HDTV
broadcasts) are based on Philips SAA7146A multimedia bridge, which has
public datasheet and there are "api- and os-independed helper-functions for
the saa7146 device driver", that are used in linuxtv.org driver, written by
Michael Hunold:

http://www.themm.net/~mihu/linux/saa7146/index.html

also there is port for FreeBSD of linuxtv.org driver 0.8.x for Skystar1
board revision 1.3 originally written by Stanislav Golovin:

http://www.gs.ru/info/si/SS1unix.html

my Russian is very poor, but good enough to understand that there is
additional work from Alexander Romanov - support for Skystar1 board revision
1.5, Andrei Gritsai (sorry, not sure about the spelling of the name) -
FreeBSD 5 support and Ruslan Latypov - FreeBSD 5.x and FreeBSD 6.x support.
so Skystar1 (revision 1.3 and 1.5) works under FreeBSD 6.x, but as i can
understand the driver has support only for "Internet via satelitte". However
if there is no other DVB-S projects under FreeBSD, Skystar1 support is very
good starting point, because with hardware modification known as "budget
patch":

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB_TT_Budget_Patch

Skystar1 becomes almost indentical (in term of operation) to all other
SAA7146A-based DVB-S cards and future support for them, should be easy, also
there are datasheets for all ICs used on Skystar1.

i'm awating to hear is it possible to watch digital TV using DVB-S card
under FreeBSD or if not, are there people interested in implementing DVB-S
support under FreeBSD or maybe currently working for such support.