[linux-dvb] Progress on specifications for Twinhan/KWorld/CTS DVB-T USB Box

[Patrick Boettcher <patrick.boettcher@desy.de>]

Hi,

I made some progress in getting specifications for the demodulator of the
Twinhan/KWorld V-Stream/CTS DVB-T USB Box.

One month ago, Bernd Wagner was so kind to pass over the established first
contact to Twinhan Taiwan. I then asked for specifications and Twinhan
Taiwan contacted the DVB-Chip vendor and make them to contact me.

To cut a long story short, it turned out, that the mentioned
power-supply-independent usb devices are working with a DiBCom 3000M
demodulator. There is no published OpenSource frontend driver for it out
yet, except my reverse-engineered vp7041 driver. Amaury Demol from DiBCom
provides me a DiBCom internal source for programming the 3000M. With the
help of this source, I or anybody else will be able to create a seperate
frontend driver.

DiBCom also provides a firmware for this device. Is it useful to put it in
a .h file and abandon the firmware_class usage in the usb-driver? What
does the kernel policy says about it?

I mean including the firmware into the kernel would make the usage of the
device much easier. Another option instead of extracting the firmware from
the windows driver file would be to put the firmware somewhere for free
download (like dvb-ttpci). This is quite easy and the kernel is not
being bloated.

Today Twinhan Austria was contacting me. They told me, that they are in
contact with convergence and that they are offering PCI devices to
them, to support driver development for Linux.
Additionally Twinhan Austria told me, that convergence offered to write
drivers for the usb devices too. Is that correct, how far is this part? I
mean this is exactly what wanted to do and to avoid overlapping I'm asking
this.

With the help of tolerant and interested vendors a new frontend driver is
on its way and with it the support of at least three usb devices for
linux. Nice, isn't it?

best regards,
Patrick