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Benson is offline Benson
2008-04-01 , 17:35
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#9
Originally Posted by Eugenia View Post
Thank you for the comment, but it doesn't help me much in my quest.
Ah, but it does.
Basically, I need two things:
1. A USB TV card dongle, that's supported by N810's V4L.
2. A TV application, like XawTV or a Gtk-based one.
#2 is satisfied by the mplayer build in the post Faheem linked; it's non-optimized and everything, but the V4L support comes from upstream, so it can be easily added into the "normal" mplayer. Use the special one for testing, but once you've got something working (or even before) an e-mail to the maintainer is likely to start things rolling on that. Once v4l is in mplayer, Canola et al. can be used as shiny front-ends.

Then, I just feed the USB dongle with a composite signal from the Canon HV20 camcorder, and then have the TV app display that as-is. Not major de-compression is going on for TV signals (composite is low-res anyway), so the N-series should handle them just fine in terms of CPU/gfx speed.

Problem is, to find the right supported dongle and TV app.
The dongle and driver are indeed the problem. Here's some tips (which you may have already realized):
It better work with x86 Linux. Well, duh.
It needs an open-source driver. Closed binary firmware probably works (though it doesn't make things easier), but closed blobs in the driver will kill you.

Fanoush is the go-to guy for kernel modules, and far more benevolent in compiling random modules than any mortal should be; if you find something that looks workable, you might ask him to try compiling the module. If the module compiles and loads, then you can try to decide whether to invest in hardware in hopes of success (which actually seems probable, from that point).