Greetings, On Friday 14 December 2001 11:59, mocm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > Nemosoft Unv. writes: > > There seems to be a new maintainer, though. Latest update was on > > November 14 at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pvr/ > > > > Hmm. A friend of mine is contemplating buying such a card; I might be > > able to borrow it from him, *if* I can get proper specs of that kfir01 > > chip. > > The kfir chip in the PVR is the same as in the card sold by > BMK-Elektronik. At least it was in the PVR that I saw. > There are Linux > drivers for the BMK board (see http://www.linuxtv.org/mpeg2/kfir.xml). Yup, I found that after my post. But are you sure it's the same chip? Because in the mailinglists there is mention of the Kfir2 chip on this board, while the PVR seems to have a Kfir1 (maybe it's downwards compatible, like most of the bt8*8 series). To me it looks like an interesting board, except for one thing: it has no tuner. Okay, for pure grabbing that doesn't really matter, but it would be so much easier if I could just watch TV and hit 'Record' (I don't think any tool out there right now supports the concept of watching with one device and grabbing with another. But I digress) > The Problem with the PVR is that the kfir is connected via the bt878 > and you have to figure out how. I am a programmer with a soldering iron. So that's the easy part :) > I think the sourceforge project has > gotten quite far with that. Don't expect any information from > Visiontech, the manufacturer of the kfir chip. Since they have been > bought by Broadcom, we haven't gotten any useful information out of > them, I noticed. They applied rule #1 in dealing with competition: "If you can't outsmart them, buy them". I find some old (broken) links to the Visiontech website, and they swept the Visiontech products under the rug quite effectively. > other than some threats about posting their firmware which they > had allowed earlier. It's probably too embarassing, should someone ever disassemble it :-) > You can get the MPEG encoder card from BMK directly, there is a > contact form on the website I mentioned above. It's a little more > expensive than the PVR, though. Getting sligthly off-topic here, but exactly then what is the point in buying the BMK card, if I can get the PVR which also includes a tuner and overlay support? Granted, the PVR drivers aren't done yet, but that hasn't stopped us before. - Nemosoft
