Philips SAA7146

A PCI interface chipset from Philips initially intended as a multimedia interface for analog audio and video.

The IC was adjusted to work with DVB by packing the demodulated MPEG-2 Transport Stream data into the video lines of the IC. This hackish approach works surprisingly well in most setups, and only a few have problems with high data loss. A moral formal approach was implemented in the saa7146 chipset's direct successor, the SAA7134, which has a a dedicated digital stream interface.

The SAA7146 is used on a number of older generation DVB cards, such as the Siemens DVB cards, TechnoTrend PCI cards, KNC1 DVB cards and TerraTec DVB cards.

Warning !!!
	In 2.6.27 and possibly other kernel versions, the Alsa snd-aw2 driver will blindly grab all saa7146 devices preventing them from working. Blacklist the snd-aw2 driver to prevent this happening.

External Links

• Datasheet
• Michael Hunold's driver information page also contains some data