[linux-dvb] State of Twinhan Cab-CI 2031 support (old version, non-mantis)

[bbee]

Hi,

I have a 2031A Cab-CI I bought a while ago. It was (and I believe still is) 
the only single pci slot card that supports DVB-C with CAM on linux.

Scouring the lists, I managed to get it running a few months ago, but only 
after applying the fix of commenting out line 1360 of dst.c. (Why hasn't 
this fix been committed yet? The card is as good as useless without it.)
I could watch video with the following command:

$ gnutv -channels ~/.czap/channels.conf -out stdout "Nederland 1" | 
mplayer -

This would work fine, but after a while gnutv outputs lots of these lines:
en50221_app_ai_parse_app_info: Received short data

The stream then stops and I have to restart mplayer, but this also happens 
with "-out null". I thought the signal quality might be bad so I didn't 
post this before, and I left the card alone for a while. Recently I rewired 
my house and the signal quality (atleast on analog) is much improved, 
dvbscan/dvbsnoop etc. still work fine, but I still get the gnutv message 
periodically.

Moreover, the above command no longer works, mplayer says:
Seek failed
No stream found.
Exiting... (End of file)

I have gone through a couple kernel revisions in the meantime, so something 
must have changed while I haven't been using the card. It might also be the 
CAM's fault, but I don't see why that should have stopped working or how to 
debug it. Any ideas?

Another thing I wasn't aware of when I bought the card was the fact that it 
has a nonstandard method of accessing the CI, I believe it's called "high 
level CI" or the like; it seems only some Twinhan cards use it and almost 
no software supports it. VLC seems to have (had?) support. I remember 
reading about the card on the mythtv changelog - mythtv is what I was after 
in the first place, so I was hopeful I could get it running and itegrated 
into mythtv.

The fact that the years-old line 1360 fix hasn't been commited, as well as 
the fact that the CI module driver dst_ca defaults to flooding kernel 
messages when you use it, leads me to think the driver is really in an 
alpha state and isn't being developed or supported. If this is true, why is 
this driver even in mainline kernel, shouldn't it be dropped?
Is anyone still working on a unified CI framework so more software might 
end up supporting the CI on this card?

Should I be getting rid of this card and getting something that will waste 
a PCI slot?? Anyone else out there still even using it?


Thanks,

bbee