Donation for technotrend premium/nexus/ss1 support? (2 Viewers)

[lugiber]

Just thought i'd tell you that enough donations have been made for a nexus card with common interface.

/Peter

 

[teampirkko]

Hi lugiber!

Do you have estimate when nexus-c/technotrend 2300 drivers for MP should be ready?

Best Regards,

Ville

 

[lugiber]

Do you have estimate when nexus-c/technotrend 2300 drivers for MP should be ready?

I don't know any of the developers and have no contact with them so i can't answer your question. But on the other hand i think it would be really hard for a developer to answer it too. You can't predict how long something like this will take since you can't possibly know the problems you'll be facing on the way. The driver will be ready when it is ready. This is what agree wrote earlier in this thread:

/.../ i cant say how long it takes. (first, i have to implement dvb-c and -t for the technisat cards) but should be faster then for the technisat-models at all, since i already do the most code (scanning, epg, teletext). so i think it will be the tuning-part, the plugins-handling, and the graph.

/Peter

 

[Nicodemuz]

Since I got the Technotrend SDK as well as a Nexus card I could take a look at how much work this would be.

The SDK include a full sample of a TV viewing software.

However the sample is for C++ and if I am not mistaken is MP written in C#?

So the question is if the the Nexus support needs to be written into MP or if it can be supplied as plugin DLL. For the latter I assume it doesn't depend of language it was written in.

We also got some license issues, I can only use the SDK to write myself a software that only runs technotrend cards...so a plugin would definately be a better choice than integrating it into MP source.

Could someone (like agree) provide the plugin interface that needs to be implemented or does the software need to create everything from scratch?

I have no experience in C#, not much experience in C++ and Windows but I am a software developer by profession (embedded systems, mostly C and assembler). I have work mates that develop for Windows daily that could help me out (they are interested in MP too, but none of them got a Nexus card).

 

[smokeman]

great!!

great to hear donations are up, and someone is looking at the possibility.

 

[Nicodemuz]

Any progress with SS1 support?

To circumvent the SDK license I would suggest using someone else implementation for SS1, someones that is based on reverse engineering the driver.

Alt-DVB is one software that got a standalone DLL to interface with SS1. Hopefully Altxro (owner/maker of Alt-DVB) allows us to use that DLL.
See http://dvbn.happysat.org/viewforum.php?f=54 for more info.

 

[lugiber]

I think it would be better to use a driver that is written for media portal. That way you would be guaranteed that the driver would stay free. If we would use the alt-dvb driver and the author would decide to start charging money for his software we would be in trouble.
Besides if the programmers of mp would not have the source for the driver they would have to back engineer the driver itself.
Don't mean to sound negative but i think it is better to just wait for the programmers of mp to do their magic.

/Peter

 

[Nicodemuz]

To circumvent the SDK license I would suggest using someone else implementation for SS1, someones that is based on reverse engineering the driver.

"To circumvent the SDK license ..."

If the MP people has time and knowledge to reverse engineer the SS1 driver I agree with you. And a lot of information are available in Linux sources to acheive that.

But if that isn't a way forward and since the license for the SS1 SDK prohibits MP from supporting any other DVB cards I beleive using a third party driver could be a solution.

It doesn't hurt to ask (negotiate with) Alt-DVB maker, he probably is willing to release the driver source to a project like MP.

 

[lugiber]

"To circumvent the SDK license ..."

Sorry missed that one

If the MP people has time and knowledge to reverse engineer the SS1 driver I agree with you. And a lot of information are available in Linux sources to acheive that.

As i have understood it reverse engineering is hard and takes a long time. But i'm not sure if someone has already started working on nexus support or not so perhaps this is under way.

But if that isn't a way forward and since the license for the SS1 SDK prohibits MP from supporting any other DVB cards I beleive using a third party driver could be a solution.

I didn't know of these restrictions of the sdk. This is really bad! Do you have any idea on how meedio and showshifter got around this. I find it hard to belive that they reverse engineered the drivers. I think i read somewhere that they only use the drivers provided by hauppauge/technotrend to make the cards work. Perhaps that is the way to get around the license issues with the sdk.

It doesn't hurt to ask (negotiate with) Alt-DVB maker, he probably is willing to release the driver source to a project like MP.

You are absolutly right! All ways on getting support for our cards are good ones.

/Peter

 

[dman_lfc]

The Nexus support should use the original drivers.
The implementation (if done) will use 'Helper' code to talk to the driver with the provided API calls from the SDK to tell it how to tune, provide a/v control & datacontrol etc.

DMAN