On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 01:43:27PM +0200, Gerd Knorr wrote:
Holger Waechtler <holger@qanu.de> writes:
The resulting API is ultra-thin and simple, basically only a frontend
API and a mmap'd TS ringbuffer form the entire DVB device. Nothing
more is needed. This all are fuzzy ideas yet, though -- but their time
will come.
[snip]
I'm not sure through it would be a good idea to actually do that.
Doing the demuxing in the kernel has its advantages when it comes to
multiple applications using the DVB card at the same time. One TV
application, one teletext browser, some daemon fishing eit data in the
background to build a epg, ...
In an embedded / set-top box environment it's probably not a big issue
as you've a vdr-like moster application doing *everything*, so it's
easy to demux and distribute the data in userspace. For the linux
desktop it's different through.
The API should reflect the capabilities of the hardware. While
PCI/USB cards seem to get simpler, STB chips grow more and
more complicated with special purpose hw facilities for
every aspect of MPEG stream handling.
Not the multi-codec MPEG2/MPEG4/DivX/WMA/WMV processors, they are
becoming more and more programmable DSPs. Basically we have the same
development like a few years ago in the consumer graphics card sector,
fixed-function chipsets first become more and more complex and then
obsolete due to availability of fully programmable hardware.