Saa7162 devices

Introduction

In March 2005, Philips Semiconductors announced "the industry's first integrated PCI Express dual global video and stereo decoder for digital home PC desktops and notebooks" (press release). The new analog decoder chip, the saa7162, uses the increased bandwidth of the PCI Express bus to capture to two simultaneous analog channels of live tv or baseband video (cf. product flyer) or up to four independent simultaneous digital TV streams (cf. Philips/NXP SAA7162 product brief).

In Oct 2006, NXP created a saa7162 product page that includes, amongst other information, an 18 page "preliminary short data sheet" for download: SAA7162 Product Description.

The PCI-SIG lists SAA7162 (dual A/V decoder) and SAA7160/SAA7161 (multimedia A/V bridge) as PCIe devices.

Supported Cards

According to Philips' reference design, Philips themselves have produced a Linux driver. In May 2007 Richard Dale finally succeeded in obtaining the v1.0 driver set. The good news is that the code is under the GPL license; the bad news is that it's not yet in decent shape. Check up on Richard's site for updates.

This means there's still no released Linux driver for the saa7162, but support for PCIe cards incorporating the sa7162 chip is getting closer.

Examples of saa7162 Based Cards

DNTV PCI Express cards

• DNTV Live! Dual Hybrid PCI Express (a rebadge of the FlyTV Express X1 MST-T2A2EX, see below)
• DNTV Live! QuattroS PCI Express

See [ttp://marc.info/?l=linux-video&m=115718592220235&w=2 v4l discussion].

FlyTV Express cards

• FlyTV Express X1

Philips PCV290

Dual DVB-T and Dual DVB-S Reference Design

Uses 2xTDA8263 DVB-S Tuner, 1 x TDA10093 Dual Channel DVB-S channel decoder, 2xTDA8275A DVB-T Tuner, 2xTDA10046A DVB-T channel decoder, 1xSAA7162E TV video/audio decoder/PCI express interface)

KWorld PCI Express Hybrid

An early example of a card that uses the saa7162 decoder chip is this hybrid card, which also supports Intel's serial digital video out (SDVO):

See product page.

(Someone needs to tell them it's hybrid, not hybird!)

ViXS Diamond Reference Design

In August 2005, ViXS Systems announced the Diamond PCI Express TV tuner reference design. The design provides for analog and hybrid (analog/digital) video processing, combining ViXS' XCode II-L Dual MPEG Encoder with Philips' SAA7162 Dual Video Decoder and Philips' TV tuner (press release).

Pinnacle PCTV Dual Hybrid Pro

Tuner cards from Pinnacle with PCI Express, e.g. PCTV Dual Hybrid Pro PCI-e