[pvrusb2] Grabster AV400 and TS support..

[Andrea Venturi]

Il 03/10/2013 07:23, Mike Isely ha scritto:
> On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Andrea Venturi wrote:
>
> ...However with that said, it's been quite a while and there certainly 
> haven't been any complaints so I guess I should get off my *ss and get 
> the "experimental" designation removed... 

maybe let me do some more tests in the next few days to refresh Terratec 
status and we'll see if the experiment mark is ready to go..

are you willing to bring forward some janitorial patches, eventually?


>
>> i'm writing here because i'd like to finally test the Transport Stream
>> internal generation.
>>
>> i've read here and there on the web and it says it's a feature available only
>> on "old" encoder firmware.
>>
>> BTW i've seen that you can get an idea of a firmware version if you give a
>> look at string Version inside encoder firmware, as in:
>>
>>   $ strings /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw | grep Version
>>   Version 2.04.211
>>   $ md5sum /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw
>>   ab75947ef1b086e26f9b08e628baa02e  /lib/firmware/v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw
> That's very interesting.  I was unaware that these opaque firmware blobs
> had any means for being version controlled at all.

i saw in cx2341x.h, there's a API command called CX2341X_ENC_GET_VERSION 
and it matches with the string embedded.


>    Since I have no
> documentation on the machine language used by the encoder (all that
> really exists in the community is a semi-complete ABI for communicating
> with the part), I've never even tried to reverse-engineer the blob.  I
> should update the fwextract program to annotate its output with the
> embedded version information.

in my further attempts to gain some skill on driver modding and insight 
on capabilities, i've put this piece of code in a place where it should 
have been called: "pvr2_encoder_prep_config()" in pvrusb2-encoder.c

===========
         u32 retData;
         if (!pvr2_encoder_cmd(hdw, CX2341X_ENC_GET_VERSION, 0, 1, 
&retData)) {
                 pvr2_trace(
                         PVR2_TRACE_ERROR_LEGS,
                         "Firmware version: %x.%x.%x",
                         retData>>24&0xff, retData>>16&0xff, 
retData&0xffff);
         } else {
                 pvr2_trace(
                         PVR2_TRACE_ERROR_LEGS,
                         "Firmware version not returned");
         }
==========

and i get indeed a consistent output when i do a capture with "cat 
/dev/video0/ > /dev/null".

in dmesg i find (with debug=0x40001f in pvrusb2 module load):
...
[10134.320514] pvrusb2: pvr2_encoder_configure (cx2341x module)
[10134.333540] pvrusb2: Firmware version: 2.4.11
...

of course this informative call would need to be put after firmware 
upload into encoder, not when starting real encoding..

BTW ivtv driver has a special page related to "firmware versions":

   http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Firmware_versions

and here there's "trace" of this version 2.4.11 (11 is a typo, i 
suppose.. it should be 2.4.211):

====
PVR250/350
    Encoder: 0x02040011, md5sum ab75947ef1b086e26f9b08e628baa02e
====

>
>
>> ...
>
>> so the first questions:
>>
>> - has TS support been scrapped from the pvrusb2 driver?
> No, but it was never added either.  TS support is purely a question at
> the encoder chip level; the pvrusb2 driver doesn't do anything to help
> (or hinder) that.  It never has.

good.

>
>> - which is one firmware version known to be available for my tests
> No idea.  The driver doesn't discriminate firmware versions at all - it
> treats them all exactly the same.  This is sounding like we would need
> to add new functionality to detect the version of the loaded cx2341x
> firmware blob and then run-time adjust the behavior of cx2341x.c,
> pvrusb2-encoder.c and very likely also pvrusb2-hdw.c (which defines all
> knobs / switches visible in sysfs).  Nothing of that concept exists in
> the driver - it never has been there.

i suppose that, for next test, if i force "pvrusb2-hdw." to show "MPEG-2 
Transport Stream" in sysfs ctl_stream_type control file, i can try to 
make the API firmware set TS and see if it returns an ERROR or OK ack..

in the cx2341x.c there's some code for switching between a "having TS" 
and "not having TS" but maybe it's just supported on the ivtv/pvr250 driver.


bye

andrea