MPeg2 Board

["Ralph Metzler <" <rjkm@netcologne.de>]

Hi Bob,

Bob Black writes:
 > 
 > A couple of questions regarding the BMK board / Visiontech chip drivers.
 > 1)  How were the drivers available under GPL, i would assume it is 
 >     because that huge ass microcode file has all of the proprietary code.  
 >     At first glance it looks like the kfir.c file reads the firmware into 
 >     memory, does it then execute it so the driver can be gpled?  
 >     i don't know enough about the rest of the code to figure out if it is 
 >     ever executed.

Yes, the microcode is proprietary. But it is loaded into the various
chips and should be considered part of the hardware not the Linux driver.
The Altera microcode, e.g., only provides an I2C interface to control
the video decoder and manages the memory accesses to the other chips
(including making the microcode download to them possible).

All parts of the driver running on the PC itself are GPLed and
available as source code.

 
 > 2)  How similar is the BMK board to the WinTV-PVR ( 880 )  The only thing 
 >     i would guess is that from the drivers it looks like the BMK board 
 >     uses a philips chip and hauppauge probably uses a BT/Conexant chip 
 >     because they use them in all of their other products.
 >     ( Though i can't confirm that because i can't ever find any board 
 >       level specs on their page. )
 >     How easy would it be to modify the drivers for hauppage or any of the 
 >     other boards that utilize the kfir chip?

We have programming experience (bttv driver + kfir driver) 
with most chipsets on this board but without exact information on how 
the chipsets are connected to each other it is hard to say how easy
it would be.
Until now I only saw pictures of the WinTV-PVR which donīt show all
the details. Itīs hard to even recognize all the chips.


 > 3)  Does the VisionTek chip support hardware assisted decoding?
 >     Not that modern computers need it or there will be linux support for 
 >     it in the near future unless you guys are working on it for your 
 >     set top box stuff.

The Kfir chip does not support this.
If you follow the links to the web site of Visiontech you will see
that they have two upcoming new products, the Kfir2 and the Kfir2-A.
The Kfir2 also only supports encoding but has the PCI bridge and audio
encoder built-in. The Kfir2-A seems to suppport decoding.
I donīt know when cards with these chips will be available.

Best regards,
Ralph