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/

[Jason Harmening]

Hi Tom,

The cx88 kernel drivers should "just work" w/ your card--if you don't
care about analog, you'll only need to load cx88mpeg.ko.

All the stuff that will need to happen to get your card working will
be in userspace, in the cx88 capture app and libtuner.
Konstantin Dimitrov (***@gmail.com) has been working on
DVB-S/S2 support w/ IIRC some Hauppauge cards and the cx88 driver. I
know he's successfully captured DVB-S TV, but he's super busy right
now & hasn't been able to push any of his code to the main branch. If
you're interested in contributing, you should ping him to see where
he's at and what you can do to help.

Thanks,
Jason

[Tim Borgeaud]

I have been playing around with compiling V4L (Linux) DVB drivers using a
layer of compatibility code derived from Luigi Rizzo's linux-kmod-compat
port and Hans Petter Selasky's USB stack (in FreeBSD 8/current).

I've had some success getting a dib0700 based USB stick (Hauppauge
WinTV-NOVA-TD-Stick) to work and am in the process of trying to compile
some further V4L driver source (for other USB DVB-T sticks).

If there is a working V4L driver for a USB stick that you want to use, it
may be possible to use this approach to create a FreeBSD driver module.

See http://www.tangobravo.co.uk/v4l-compat for a brief description and
some code that may be used to compile v4l drivers on FreeBSD.

See also the "USB webcam++ support for FreeBSD-8-current is soon here"
post to freebsd-emulation regarding HPS' userland compatibility code:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=117918+0+archive/2009/freebsd-emulation/20090607.freebsd-emulation


Tim Borgeaud