On Saturday, January 01, 2011 21:52:35 Devin Heitmueller wrote:
> I have been doing some application conformance for VLC, and I noticed
> something interesting with regards to the G_TUNER call.
>
> If you have a tuner which supports sleeping, making a G_TUNER call
> essentially returns garbage.
> ===
> root@devin-laptop2:~# v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video1 --get-tuner
> Tuner:
> Name : Auvitek tuner
> Capabilities : 62.5 kHz stereo lang1 lang2
> Frequency range : 0.0 MHz - 0.0 MHz
> Signal strength/AFC : 0%/0
> Current audio mode : stereo
> Available subchannels: mono
> ===
> Note that the frequency range is zero (the capabilities and name are
> populated by the bridge or video decoder). Some digging into the
> tuner_g_tuner() function in tuner core shows that the check_mode()
> call fails because the device's mode is T_STANDBY. However, it does
> this despite the fact that none of values required actually interact
> with the tuner. The capabilities and frequency ranges should be able
> to be populated regardless of whether the device is in standby.
Agreed.
> This is particularly bad because devices normally come out of standby
> when a s_freq call occurs, but some applications (such as VLC) will
> call g_tuner first to validate the target frequency is inside the
> valid frequency range. So you have a chicken/egg problem: The
> g_tuner won't return a valid frequency range until you do a tuning
> request to wake up the tuner, but apps like VLC won't do a tuning
> request unless it has validated the frequency range.
>
> Further, look at the following block:
>
> if (t->mode != V4L2_TUNER_RADIO) {
> vt->rangelow = tv_range[0] * 16;
> vt->rangehigh = tv_range[1] * 16;
> return 0;
> }
>
> This basically means that a video tuner will bail out, which sounds
> good because the rest of the function supposedly assumes a radio
> device. However, as a result the has_signal() call (which returns
> signal strength) will never be executed for video tuners. You
> wouldn't notice this if a video decoder subdev is responsible for
> showing signal strength, but if you're expecting the tuner to provide
> the info, the call will never happen.
I am not aware of any tuner that does that. I think that for video this
is always done by a video decoder. That said, it isn't pretty, but a lot
of this is legacy code and I wouldn't want to change it.
> Are these known issues?
No.
> Am I misreading the specified behavior? I
> don't see anything in the spec that suggests that this call should
> return invalid data if the tuner happens to be powered down.
You are correct, G_TUNER should return valid data, even when powered down.
I suspect that G_FREQUENCY has the same problem.
This should be fixed so that both work when the tuner is powered down.
And if this is fixed, then the switch_v4l2, using_v4l2 and check_v4l2 symbols
can also be removed since they are no longer in use.
After digging some more I think that check_mode is a poor function. There are
two things that check_mode does: checking if the tuner support radio and/or tv
mode (that's fine), and if it is in standby: not so fine. That should be a
separate function since filling in frequency ranges can be done regardless of
the standby state.
Regards,
Hans
--
Hans Verkuil - video4linux developer - sponsored by Cisco
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