There was a long discussion thread on this topic several months ago, when I proposed this design for a networked tuner module. Since then, I've made alot of progress. I have a custom board with 5 tuners (VSB, QAM, and DVB) which can tune 5 independent RF channels, PID filter the streams, and send the data out over UDP/IP multicast. I took into consideration several of the comments/recommendations made earlier. The module presents a simple UDP control interface, and completely encapsulates all the low-level commands to access the tuners. I'm soliciting offers for help, from those with interest and experience with VHDL FPGA design, and driver/userspace coding. My list of TODO items includes DVB-T, DVB-CI, cable-card, OOB tuning, DTCP/IP support, upnp, and a USB-2.0 interface alternative. I'm short on hardware now, but will be making a few more boards soon. If you think you could make a technical contribution to this project, let me know. Regards, Brian --- Brian Kuschak <bkuschak@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hello, > > I'm writing to see if there is any interest here in > a > project I've been considering. It consists of a > device with a set of digital tuner modules (perhaps > 5 > or 6) which attach through an FPGA to Ethernet. The > tuners would be a combination of QAM/VSB and DVB, > for > receiving MPEG programming over cable, terrestrial > (US), and FTA DVB satellite. The filtered MPEG > packets would be sent multicast UDP, and the tuners > could be shared among multiple clients on the > network. > The device would also support I2C commands to the > tuners using control packets. The existing linux DVB > drivers would be used with some modifications. > > This would allow: 1) sharing of tuners between > multiple clients, 2) multi-channel video > applications, > 3) doing things like background scanning, > enhanced-PVR, etc, and 4) easy expansion by just > adding more devices to the LAN. > > I haven't been able to find such a device for sale, > so > I'm considering rolling my own. If anyone is > interested, or alternatively if such a thing already > exists, please let me know. __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
