[linux-dvb] Re: grr.. Any DVB-T adaptors which work reliably?

[Ragnar Sundblad <ragge@nada.kth.se>]

--On den 3 juli 2003 01:37 +0200 Juri Haberland <juri@koschikode.com> wrote:

> I'm talking about the (closed source, but Convergence has it) firmware
> that is distributed with the Linux driver. You mean the little extra
> firmware that one has to get out of the Windows driver (Sc_main.mc),
> where Convergence doesn't has the source.
Just to try to clarify the difference even more:
The Convergence firmware is for the ARM processor in the AV7110,
it is updated every now and then.
This firmware is the same for all full-featured cards (DVB-[SCT],
Nexus-S). It comes delivered in /DVB/driver/av7110/Root and Dpram,
and gets converted into av7110_firm.h.

The DVB-T 1.2 card has a DVB-T frontend (the radio signal
decoder between the radio tuner and the AV7110) called SP8870
that needs firmware of its own, and that is what is in the
Sc_main.mc. As far as I know, there has been two versions
of this firmware from TechnoTrend (or Hauppauge). Most people
seems to use the newest one, size 20108 bytes, md5 hash
53970ec17a538945a6d8cb608a7b3899.

Most other frontends don't need its own firmware, at least
not loaded from the host computer.

> It might be a problem with just this extra firmware from the Windows
> driver. I'm actually thinking of getting rid of this buggy card (see the
> vertical lines on the composite out...)
Since this seems to be quite unique to the DVB-T card, there
should be a way to fix it. The problem in my case is that I
am kind of hesitant to do to much surgery on my single pretty
expensive card. I don't want to pay for another one,
especially since they don't really work.

Is there anyone who has a just slightly broken DVB-T card,
or maybe even an extra working card that just isn't used,
that would be willing to carry out some experiments on it?
I guess this crowd here would happily help and come with
ideas and otherwise assist.

As far as I have understood, the main difference between the
DVB-T and the other cards are the tuner and demodulator
(of course) and the DC/DC step up converter for the tuner
power, and possibly voltage regulators to those.
After checking if there is some obvious power distribution
problem on the card, I would start to look at those, for
example by cutting power to them one at a time and see if
that makes any difference on the video out.

/ragge




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