[linux-dvb] Updating from old drivers

[Alistair Hamilton <alistair@tyeurgain.free-online.co.uk>]

Hello, All

I set up a machine using SuSE 8 and migrated to SUSE 9 when it was new.  This 
used a Shuttle Athlon cube with a Nova-T PCI card.

I used software of my own making that lashed together the DVB drivers, 
dvbstream, xine and lirc to make a very useful and stable (max uptime, 52 
days with no reloading of any modules and shut down only because I went on 
holiday). It could play live TV, time shift and do scheduled recordings.  It 
was just what we needed!

I decided to move to SUSE 9.1 because I wanted to be able to ACPI S3 suspend 
the machine and this requires 2.6 kernel. Fine. But I have been caught out by 
changes to the DVB driver, and I would like some input.

First, my old software allowed you to do

	> tv BBC1

(or any other channel name in ~/.tzap/channels.conf) and get full-screen tv.  
This normally was called by irexec.  This little app also supported 
recording. What it (for live TV) did was:

	1. Look up channels.conf to get channel info
	2. Call dvbtune to tune1 to the required nu
	3. Start a shell that called dvbstream -o -ps -a xxx -vyyy | xine stdin:/

That worked well then in SUSE 9.

The later drivers in  9.1 will shut themselves down after a few seconds in 
this situation, so I needed to add a process that forks off do

	tzap -r BBC1 

to keep the diver alive.  I then have to clear it up afterwards.

Why on earth do I now need to do this????  It is not a bug, it is a documented 
feature!   Why not keep the datastream alive while somone is reading it?

Second problem:

Radio reception is now FUBAR.  In the UK, I used to do:

	dbvtune -f  842166670
	dvbstream -o -a 433 | xine -H stdin:

That got me Radio 7 and I am very pleased.

dvbstream now produces:

	> /usr/bin/dvbstream -o -a 433 | xine -H stdin:/

	dvbstream v0.5 - (C) Dave Chapman 2001-2004
	Released under the GPL.
	Latest version available from http://www.linuxstb.org/
	Setting filter for PID 433
	FILTER 433: DMX SET PES FILTER: Invalid argument
	Output to stdout
	Streaming 1 stream

Take the"Invalid argument" error seriously, because it actually streams the 
utter crap on pid 434 !  I did a dvbscan and made a new channels.conf to make 
sure that nothing was changed on the broadcast side.

Alll the radio channles seem to be the same 

I used to record and listen to BBC7 every day, and it is now broken.  This is 
a working Linux/FVB-T system broken by new software!

I am annoyed: I took quite some time to get my user porgrams lashed up so that 
they would work.  I hesitated to release them because I thought that they 
were a bit tricky, but I now find the drivers to be more so.

What has gone on in the DVB driver world to cause such problems?  Unless I get 
a solution quickly, I will have to regress to SUSE9 with its 2.4 kernel.

A