On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Maarten Wisse wrote:
> I've seen an Anubis/Typhoon card which is called TV Tuner RDS
> (www.typhoonline.com). It has stereo TV and stereo Radio for a very low price.
> Looking in the 2.4 sources and the latest v4l source, I saw that there is a
> card Typhoon TView RDS / FM stereo tuner supported under number 53 (I think).
I'm owning this card as described by the said website. May be there are
different PCB versions of the card around. Differing from the original
card 53 configuration data my card needs a "gpiomask=0x1c audiomux=0,0,
0x10,0x08,0x04" option for bttv.o.
> 1. So it seems to be supported. Does this mean that TV is supported in stereo?
Yes.
> 2. Does that mean that the radio is supported too? And radio also in stereo? I
No. On this card switching between TV and radio sound is done by the audio
demodulator chip TDA9873, not by the multiplexer chip as usual for many
other TV cards. Current versions of bttv's audio chip driver can't execute
that.
> ask especially the second question because the RDS radio tuner seems to be
> based upon some curious new technology, since I saw RDS support nowhere on the
> sites of the well known manufacturers like Pinnacle or Hauppage.
Well, "curious"... The card has a Philips SAA6588 RDS decoder chip. It can
be written to an read from via I2C bus, like the other chips on TV cards.
Nothing very special.
> 3. I've seen some things about cards which need special graphic chips to be
> able to work because they do their scaling by the graphics card instead of the
> tV card itself. I've a i740 card with 8mb mem. Any information about whether
> this will work with the Typhoon card?
Don't know anything about that.
> Finally: is it reasonable to try the Typhoon card, or is the best choice to buy
> some of the standard products of Pinnacle or Hauppage? Am I going into
> _big_ trouble when trying the less well known one of Typhoon? If so, which card
> would you recommend instead?
If you prefer an uncomplicated way to get your TV card fully supported, I
think one of the more known cards is better suited. For me, I wrote
new drivers for TDA9873 and SAA6588 and changed some parts of the bttv
driver itself. I now have stereo radio plus RDS display with the Typhoon
TView RDS. But...: Since I want the card to run in an old 486 machine
with 2.0.3x kernel, I took bttv-0.6.4e for it. I haven't tested if
bttv-0.6.4e still works with current kernels.
Bye,
Rolf
