[linux-dvb] Pinnacle 80e support: not going to happen...

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Markus Rechberger <mrechberger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 11:55 PM, Devin Heitmueller
> <devin.heitmueller at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For those of you waiting for Linux support for the Pinnacle 80e, I
>> have some bad news:  it's not going to happen.
>>
>> After investing over 100 hours doing the driver work, adding support
>> for the Empia em2874, integrating with the Linux tda18271 driver,
>> incorporating the Micronas drx reference driver source, and doing all
>> the testing, Micronas has effectively killed the project.  They
>> decided that their intellectual property was too valuable to make
>> available their reference driver code in source code form.  Even
>> worse, because I've seen the sources I am effectively prevented from
>> writing any sort of reverse engineered driver for the drx-j.
>>
>
> Not so fast, even though I wasn't involved at knocking this down.
> We have a custom player now which is capable of directly interfacing the
> I2C chips from those devices. Another feature is that it supports all the
> features of those devices, there won't be any need of different applications
> anymore. There's also the thought about publishing an SDK, most applications
> have problems of detecting all corresponding devicenodes which are required
> for those devices anyway. i2c-dev is an already available and accepted
> kernel interface
> to userland just as usbfs is.

Hello Markus,

Yeah, I saw the screenshots for Empia eeeTV on your website a few days
ago - it looks like a neat application and there is certainly a place
for a well written application to watch TV.

For those of you not familiar, Markus is working on his own dedicated
TV watching application for Linux and BSD:
http://mcentral.de/wiki/index.php5/ISDB-T

I agree that it is certainly true that a closed-source application
could be used with the Pinnacle 80e (since such application would be
able to accommodate the Micronas binary-only licensing), however this
approach does restrict access to those devices to that specific
application and is not a more general solution that would work with
whatever application the user wants to use (such as MythTV, Kaffeine,
mplayer, etc).

So for many people, this could be a viable approach.

Regards,

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller
http://www.devinheitmueller.com
AIM: devinheitmueller