[linux-dvb] Re: CAMs - the never ending story...

[Johannes Stezenbach <js@convergence.de>]

On Sun, Apr 14, 2002 at 11:49:04AM +0200, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
> The big question is: Why is this so? Why don't (some) CAMs work with
> the LinuxDVB driver, while they do work fine under Windows?

The DVB Common Interface spec is quite complicated, and thus there's
much source code dedicated to CAM handling in the firmware.
What keeps us from fixing CAM related bugs is simply lack
of time -- the developers having the required knowledge
are busily working on drivers for totally different hardware.
If it were easy to fix CAM support we'd already have done it.

> So, what can we do to change this? Apparently the LinuxDVB users can't
> do anything, because the driver firmware is "closed source". So the
> only people who could really do something about this are the driver
> developers. I sometimes get the feeling that they are somehow afraid
> of making all this work fine, and fear possible conflicts with pay tv
> providers.

Not true. What pay TV providers fear is the distribution of
knowledge about the CA systems, not the distribution of
binary only cruft that would enable you to pay them for their
services.

> To bring this posting to a conclusion, I'd like to ask the driver
> developers: is there any interest on your side in making (all!)
> CAMs work with LinuxDVB, just as they do with DVB under Windows?

Interest: Yes. But I don't see it happening anytime soon. Sorry.

> What can we (the LinuxDVB community) do to help you with this?

I don't think it would be possible for anyone outside of
convergence to work on the firmware, because of various NDA's.

We could maybe try to use the Windows driver's firmware
in our driver, but I guess that would break OSD support
and maybe other parts of the API.


Regards,
Johannes



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