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

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Wed Apr 19 10:48:30 UTC 2006


Brian Wood writes:

> 
> On Apr 18, 2006, at 8:02 PM, Chris wrote:
> 
>> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>>> Non-free software and drivers defeats the whole purpose of using  
>>> Linux.
>>> That's not really what many people have invested a lot of their time,
>>> and money, into.
>> Really!  Try playing HDTV in Mythtv without them!
> 
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> I've been looking at my system and you know what? It is RIDDLED with  
> "proprietary binary blobs".
> 
> There's one in my BIOS chip, they exist in the microcode in the CPU,  
> they are in my SCSI controller. The firmware in my hard drives is NOT  
> "open source", even some stuff in our beloved PVRs is "closed source".
> 
> My God, it's everywhere. This is terrible !
> 
> So why are we picking on the graphics card makers ???

Because they shove their binary blobs into the kernel.

This is not rocket science.  Nobody cares if you need to upload a firmware 
blob to the card, to run.  This has been going on for ages, and nobody has a 
problem with that.  And, over time, they even wrote a fairly good 
implementation for the entire infrastructure needed to do that (hotplug).

> I guess because it resides on OUR ram and hard drives, and not on  
> some other device ?

Please, don't try to guess like that.  The results aren't pretty.

> So what, code is code, no matter where it is located. I wish there  
> were open-source drivers for video cards, but if people want to get  
> silly, like not allowing "non-GPL" stuff to link into the kernel,  
> then we would have to get rid of a lot of things besides our picture  
> makers.

Nope, I'm afraid that video card drivers are pretty much it.  Occasionally 
there's a wireless card that's also guilty, but for the most part it's just 
the video cards.

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