Hello all, please let me introduce myself: my name is Michael Hunold and I'm the original author of the saa7146 driver, on which Convergence has based it's driver for the av7110 driver. My parts are only used for the Video4Linux output for the full-featured dvb cards with on-board mpeg decoder, I have nothing to do with the actual dvb driver or the dvb api -- until now. 8-)
A little bit of history: Convergence forked their av7110 driver from an early release of my driver, which supported the Video4Linux-1 interface of the kernel. Although the driver core was meant to be modular, it wasn't quite usable out-of-the-box, and so the authors decided to hack changes directly into the driver core. Lately, the new Video4Linux-2 api made it into the kernel and the famous bttv driver and the new saa7134 driver are already available for it. In the meantime, I developped my saa7146 driver for analogue tv cards further and ported it to the overhauled Video4Linux-2 api lately. (have a look at http://www.mihu.de/linux/ for further informations) Just about the time I planned to submit this new saa7146 driver core plus the additional drivers to the kernel, the dvb av7110 driver was added to the 2.5.x kernel series by Alan Cox and is available since 2.5.50 now in the official kernel. Theoretically, it should be possible to have both drivers in the kernel and they should not interfere each other. But practically, this would be a really ugly hack: most likely both drivers don't work together, it would mean massive code duplication and fixing bugs in two drivers, when it could be done in one and -- this is the worst for me -- both core drivers would carry *my* name in it. So I recently contacted Hoger W�chtler at Convergence and asked if it was possible to unify the two saa7146 driver cores again. He agreed and so I began working on it. I'm happy to announce, that the results are now available in the "dvb-kernel" module of the CVS and can be tried for both 2.5.x kernels by patching the kernel (as it was possible before) and for 2.4.x kernels by compiling the new driver as stand-alone modules. The install instructions for 2.5.x kernels can be found in dvb-kernel/README, the install instructions for 2.4.x kernels are in dvb-kernel/build-2.4/README. Please let me state the following explicitly: The change of the saa7146 driver core does *NOT* mean that anything related to the dvb-core, the dvb api or similar has changed. The changes do *NOT* affect the way the dvb subsystem or all the dvb-tools work, so all dvb applications *must* behave exactly the same. I simply took the av7110 driver and put it 1:1 onto my saa7146 driver core, and modified and extended the core to support some additional stuff that was added by Convergence to my driver. What has changed, however, is the support for the Video4Linux subsystem. The driver is a Video4Linux-2 driver, but there is a system-wide compatibility layer for "old" Video4Linux-1 applications. But, expect problems with Video4Linux-1 applications that try to be "clever" when using the Video4Linux-1 api. Ok, I tried the driver myself for 2.4.18 and 2.5.52 with a Siemens DVB-S 1.3 and the tools from the apps directory and the most important applications vdr and xawtv. It works flawlessly. Please try out the new driver and report your problems to the mailing-list. I'm especially interested in results with so-called budget cards. If you have problem with particular video applications, please tell me about it. I'll have a look at it and try to adjust the compatibility layer (if possible) or urge the author of the software to use Video4Linux-2 instead... ;-) Recent Video4Linux-1 applications should work, I tried "effectv" and "tvtime" successfully for example. Currently, "tuxview" does not work very good -- is anyone actually using it? Expect that there are a few glitches here and there at the beginning, but I'm trying to fix all problems asap. Have fun Michael Hunold. -- Info: To unsubscribe send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe linux-dvb" as subject.
