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Open Source TBS6980/1 driver

Added by Adam Sutton over 11 years ago

As a result of being rather fed up with the poor performance of his TBS6981, particularly since upgrading to TVH 3.4, Luis Alves decided to take it upon himself to investigate.

He set about writing his own version of the drivers, based on analysis of the TBS drivers and using an existing OSS driver (with similar demod chip) as a reference. He has now completed this driver and the result of his analysis is that the TBS driver has some fundamental issues that make failures very likely.

His driver is now complete and relatively easy to install (you do still need to extract firmware from the official drivers, but instructions to do this are provided). In addition to this he's also hoping to write a driver for the 6984 which shares the same demod chip. He also hopes to get the driver submitted upstream so that it becomes a standard part of the Linux kernel. See his github wiki.

We would strongly recommend that all users of the 6980/1 switch to this driver ASAP.

For those that are interested, we have been trying to have a dialog with TBS's driver maintainer, unfortunately the results so far have not been great. You can read the current state of things on the Tvheadend blog

The Tvheadend Team


Comments

Added by Andy Barnett over 11 years ago

Having problems attempting to build the driver on a dedicated Debian box with a minimal install (dedicated tvheadend server) comes back with the following...

root@tvheadend:~/media_build# make dir DIR=../media
make -C linux/ dir DIR="../../media"
make1: Entering directory `/root/media_build/linux'
rm -rf drivers firmware include sound .patches_applied .linked_dir .git_log.md5 git_log kernel_version.h
../../media does not contain kernel sources
/bin/sh: 1: exit: Illegal number: -1
make1: * [dir] Error 2
make1: Leaving directory `/root/media_build/linux'
make: * [dir] Error 2

Do I actually need the kernel sources in the make directory? Seems like overkill to build a driver...

Thoughts?

Andy B

Added by Dave Haakenhout about 11 years ago

Hi,

As if kernel linux-headers-3.8.0-30-generic the drivers compile but wont be reconized anymore ca someone confirm this ?

Dave

Added by Steve Murray about 11 years ago

Took some effort to get compiled and working - but a huge improvement over the TBS Drivers.

Added by Daniel Hitchcock about 11 years ago

Anybody know if this will work with the 6982/4 cards?