2011/11/16 Manu Abraham abraham.manu@gmail.com:
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 4:38 AM, Klaus Schmidinger Klaus.Schmidinger@tvdr.de wrote:
That is also my understanding of multi frontend devices. If an "adapter" has several "frontends" only one of them can be active at any given time. This has nothing to do with any "explosives" (excuse the pun ;-) and will be implemented in the core VDR code as time permits. Right now I'm cleaning up the "lnb sharing" (aka "device bonding") stuff and will hopefully find more time for VDR development by the end of the year (and thereafter).
If I am following you correctly, There is one issue however. If an adapter can have only a single frontend, then there will exist another issue:
- Card has dual multi standard frontend(s).
- Card has CI cards on both the paths (2 CI controllers)
- Card provides scrambled stream as well as descrambled stream (4
simultaneous streams)
- Card needs to swap between the CI modules to take advantage of the
different modules, rather than reconnecting antenna inputs/manually swapping the CI modules.
Eventually, to handle such a situation: all the nodes exposed to the application has to be under the "same" adapter, rather than as 4 different adapters, of which 2 of them won't have any frontend or ca devices.
To my understanding the mentioned use case would have - according to linux-media project logic of how to handle this - would look like
/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend1 /dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0 ... /dev/dvb/adapter0/ca0 /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0 /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend1 /dev/dvb/adapter1/demux0 ... /dev/dvb/adapter1/ca0
so it would be 2 adapter with 4 frontends. If for some reason they should be in one adapter how to distinguish between the different cases ? Maybe i did not understand properly the issue.
Anyhow - if such a case exist - it needs to be discussed how it will be handled at driver side and how applications need to talk to the driver - it doesnt help to implement the perfect driver, if nobody can use it. The multi frontend approach for multi-standard devices as described here, should logically anyway only be used if more then one receiption possibility can be connected at the same time. (i.e. if sattelite cable also can contain the DVB-T signal or both can be connected same time)
Reading linux-media mailing list doesn't give a clear picture on the rules on one hand , but on the other hand implementations like the mentioned one exist. Preferably the API would describe how to handle it and rules exist for the drivers to be followed, so that applications dont get broken if following the API.