[pvrusb2] First take on a chinese oem capture card with FX2 and cx25843

[Svenn Are Bjerkem]

Hi,
just out of curiosity (and some need) I bought one of these dvr oem
usb2 cards which happen to be available for purchase. Normally seems
to only run under winxp32 and with an application called superdvr.
I opened the box and took some pictures of the PCB to identify the components.

http://invalid.ed.ntnu.no/~svenn/html/oem_usb2_capture_card.html

For a cheap chinese card, I find it funny that they have taken the
hasle to mount the mini-USB socket while soldering a cable on the back
side, but that's maybe for production programming. Most of the
components are traceable, except for one unmarked chip. Since it
contains the FX2 and cx25843 chip, I have been searching on the net
for more information on drivers for cards using these chips, and I
have found that it is mostly TV-tuner cards appearing in the
discussions. I am trying out several tutorials on programming the FX2
with the linux driver in order to load a cx25843 firmware, either the
linux one or the one downloaded by the winxp driver. I have to take
one step at a time.

I read on the homepage of the pvrusb2 driver that raw mode is not
supported yet and this card assumingly does not have an mpeg encoder
(unless that magic chip is one) and will probably feed some raw data
on the USB channel. I will have to deal with that if I get that far.

I post this, probably on the wrong mailinglist, in the hope that some
other participant ever came across this card and would share any
experience or pitfalls. I have just recently begun investigating and I
have really no clue which application should be able to read the data
that the USB connection provides. I am also in the process on reading
up on v4l in order to find which direction to proceed. Currently I
feel I have more knowledge about the chips on the board (I'm a
hardware engineer) than the driver and application infrastructure.

Eventually this capture card will be used with a UMPC running Linux to
monitor moving parts of machinery. (Need to use cheap parts that I can
afford to lose during development)

Kind regards,
-- 
Svenn