[mythtv-users] Current wisdom on PVR-150/250/350/500

Joe Votour joevph at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 17 04:11:11 UTC 2006




--- Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:

> 
> On Apr 16, 2006, at 9:50 PM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> 
> > On 04/16/2006 11:43 PM, Jeff Simpson wrote:
> >> I don't see Hauppauge jumping up to release ANY
> drivers for their
> >> hardware. They are all about saying "Works in
> Linux / MythTV", but
> >> they won't even release register maps for their
> hardware to
> >> developers, we've had to reverse engineer. The
> ivtv driver was  
> >> written
> >> by somebody from what I assume was reverse
> engineering the windows
> >> driver and reading the specs for the various
> chips on the card.
> >>
> >
> > In truth, Hauppauge isn't quite as bad as this
> makes them sound.
> > They've been /very/ forthcoming with information
> /they own/ about  
> > their
> > cards.  Unfortunately, they build their cards from
> components made by
> > other manufacturers whose NDA's prevent Hauppauge
> from releasing
> > information about those components and their
> internal workings.
> 
> 
> I agree, Hauppauge has been as forthcoming as they
> can be and should  
> be commended.
> 
> What I don't understand is why nVidia behaves the
> way they do. They  
> certainly *do* own the information about how their
> devices work, and  
> I really don't see how releasing the information
> could hurt them, and  
> although increased sales to the oopen software
> community might be  
> minor, any sale is a good sale.
> 
> In order for any normal user to make any use of the
> information they  
> have to have purchased their hardware. Are they
> worried about the  
> competition (ATI?) learning something that might
> give them a  
> competitive edge? I frankly doubt that would happen.
> 
> This is nothing new with graphics cards, I recall
> having to purchase  
> an X server from X-Inside or Metro-X in order to get
> full support for  
> a Mach-64 card under Linux, under slakware with a
> 1.2 kernel IIRC.  
> (BTW, Happy Birthday Patrick Volkerding recently).
> 
> Is there a logical reason for all this secrecy, or
> is it just the  
> same thing that drives the military to classify the
> recipe for  
> creamed-chipped-beef?
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> 

Unfortunately, nVidia doesn't have the rights to
distribute information about all of the components in
their video cards/drivers.  There are parts of code
and hardware that they license from other people.  A
good example of this would be the TV-out chips before
they started making their own (at one point, they used
to use Brooktree/Conexant TV-out chips).

Some of the technology is patented, some of it is
trade secrets.

Believe me, their competition could learn a great deal
from just their drivers, since drivers are an
interface to the hardware.  As an example, the
competition might see in the driver some great way to
shrink down a transfer of data implemented in the
driver (which exposes how the hardware works), and
decide to then add that logic to their next graphics
chip.

I'm not saying that I like the binary drivers (I would
rather have open-source drivers that can do the
frills, like hardware accelerated OpenGL), but they're
better than nothing.  The way I see it, it's just like
Windows, except that typically Microsoft doesn't
change the API on a whim within the same kernel
revision (which leads to problems of itself, but
that's a different discussion).  :)

-- Joe

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