Cx18

From IVTV

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Obtaining the driver 3 Features 4 Firmware 5 Questions, etc.

Introduction

This page is for the cx18 driver that supports the cx23418 chip. This driver was made possible by the kind support from Hauppauge and Conexant.

With driver versions older than v1.0.4 there are PCI bus issues that may manifest as I2C bus errors. The typical symptom is that the tveeprom of the HVR1600 cannot be read, and in fact no i2c bus traffic seems to work.

The driver is merged into 2.6.26. However, there have been a lot of fixes since, so I recommend to use the v4l-dvb repository instead (see the section below).

Obtaining the driver

The driver is available here from the v4l/dvb repository:

http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/

The easiest way to build it is to get the tar.bz2 archive:

http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/archive/tip.tar.bz2

Unpack, 'make menuconfig', 'make', 'make install' (as root), 'make unload' (as root) and run 'modprobe cx18'.

Features

Analog MPEG PS and TS capturing

Digital TS capture from a digital tuner & demodulator

Raw YUV capture and raw PCM capture

Raw and Sliced VBI

Sliced VBI insertion into the analog MPEG PS (not the analog TS)

ATSC support, 8-VSB and QAM, for the HVR-1600

Also pretty much all of the controls that were also in ivtv are working with cx18.

The Compro VideoMate H900 is supported along with a Conexant Raptor PAL/SECAM Evaluation board (Thanks Conexant!) - both cards are analog only hardware. A few other cards are autodetected, but due to lack of testing, probably don't work beyond basic CVBS or SVideo capture. User photos and testing are needed to improve support for these cards.

In the future, I'll take care of the remaining analog issues:

• MPEG index support
• bilingual support

Firmware

Conexant gave us permission to redistribute the firmware files. Get them here.

This is the license covering these files:

The cx23418 firmware files:

v4l-cx23418-apu.fw
v4l-cx23418-cpu.fw
v4l-cx23418-dig.fw

are covered by the following license:

Conexant grants permission to use and redistribute these firmware
files for use with Conexant devices, but not as a part of the Linux
kernel or in any other form which would require these files themselves
to be covered by the terms of the GNU General Public License.
These firmware files are distributed in the hope that they will be
useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty
of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Questions, etc.

Please use the ivtv-devel or ivtv-users mailinglists for all things cx18. It is helpful if the subject of the post is prefixed with 'cx18:'.