Hi Vincent, I will send the answer to your question to the linuxdvb and video4linux mailing lists, because there may be some people interested in it. Vincent Legoll writes: > > [...] (X-card, can do mpg4 replay) based card would be even > > better, but we can't give out/write those drivers as open source > > Why can't we write one ? > Is there something that prevent someone doing so ? > Are you implying that we're never going to have linux drivers for > those cards ? I was about to buy one, but now... > No, I meant that we (Ralph and I) can't write an open source driver, because we wrote a closed source one by looking at sigmas sources( that's the driver for the em8400 based cards like netstream). The problem is that all the em8xxx chips are quite similar and therefore it would be questionable if we could write one for the em845x/em847x cards which have mpg4 support (like X-card). AFAIK, sigma already has or will release user space closed source drivers for those chips, the idea of which I really don't like. They could just as easily release kernel modules, which would simplify a lot of the stuff they are doing in there current "drivers" and would allow them to use APIs like video4linux and maybe the DVB API. I don't even know if or how the drivers we wrote for convergence can be released. Probably only in conjunction with an STB. There already are open source drivers for the em8300 chipset (i.e. dxr3 cards), those have been reverse engineered and I started to write DVB API wrappers for those drivers, but I haven't had time to finish those yet. You can see how far I've gotten in the NEWSTRUCT branch of the public CVS at linuxtv.org. You have to look for the sigma drivers on their website. AFAIR they are not easy to find, but they are there. I don't have a link right now. This all very unfortunate, because those chips are really nice and the playback is very good picture and stability wise. The new cards are very inexpensive (~$99) and provide mpg4 replay. Maybe there is someone who would like to use his or her legal right to reverse engineer those cards (depending on the country you live in), you can use the winodws and linux drivers to do that. Marcus -- /--------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Dr. Marcus O.C. Metzler | | |--------------------------------|-----------------------------------| | mocm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx | http://www.metzlerbros.de/ | \--------------------------------------------------------------------/
