Development: Linux DVB API history and future

Introduction

Digital Video Broadcasting is an evolving field and every month new chipsets, STBs and software becomes available. Demands and Requirements change and thus even the best-established APIs have to evolve.

We tried to develop the public API in the past in a very conservative way so that application developers see only a minimum impact on their already-written code. Here a short overview over the pasttime milestones:

v1: the old Nokia API

Originally implemented on the first AV711x-based Siemens/Technotrend DVB-C and DVB-S cards by Christian Theiss and the Metzler Brothers for Convergence Integrated Media.

v2: the NEWSTRUCT branch

The first major Refactoring Step, after this process had stabilized we were ready for all DVB-S, DVB-C and DVB-T cards and STBs available in those days.

v3: DVB is part of the official Kernel

This API version mainly contained namespace cleanups but was mostly binary-compatible with the NEWSTRUCT branch.

Today hosted in the dvb-kernel module in CVS.

v4: use all features of today's STBs

The API was extended to support all features of today's latest STBs. Includes some cleanups.

The project is currently not actively maintained. Unfortunately, none of the developers has worked on it for quite some time now due to various reasons. So the project is in some sort of sleep-mode.

If you are interested in developing the V4 API futher and want to work on the project, please contact Michael Hunold <hunold@linuxtv.org>.

v5: tomorrow.

(let's see;)