Re: tv tuners

[Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2010 at 11:41:47AM -0400, matthew sporleder wrote:
> I am looking for a good solution for getting/recording television on a
> netbsd system and am wondering if anyone else is doing the same.
> 
> Currently I am looking at two solutions:
>  KWORLD ATSC TV Stick UB435-Q USB 2.0 Interface <- usb tuner.  Is this
> (or something similar) supported anywhere in netbsd?  If so, how are
> people's experiences?
> 
>  SiliconDust HDHomeRun Network-based Single Digital HDTV Tuner
> HDHR-T1-US Ethernet Interface <- streams upnp so recording video
> should be os-independent.

My knowledge about the subject is very limited, but I think bktr(4) is the
only supported driver. There is however now the video(9) API. I believe
there are also some ongoing efforts in FreeBSD to use the (GPL) Linux
drivers, but I don't know the details.

I've tried to write couple of USB DVB-{C,T} drivers (and who knows, maybe I
can actually finish these some day; one thing that has hold back the work is
that in these things the bridge between the USB device and the frontend
demodulator is typically done via I2C). Unfortunately, datasheets are scare
and limited. I think majority of TV/DVB drivers in Linux are reverse
engineered.

FWIW, in Linux I use VDR[1] and couple of budget cards from TerraTec.

- Jukka.

[1] http://www.tvdr.de/