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Date:      Thu, 21 Aug 1997 11:55:27 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Mark Tinguely <tinguely@plains.NoDak.edu>
To:        freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org, sales@omt.com
Subject:   Regard to phone call about FreeBSD drivers
Message-ID:  <199708211655.LAA06436@plains.NoDak.edu>

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To:   Mr Reddy
      OmniMedia Technology, Inc
      sales@omt.com
From: Mark Tinguely
      NDSU Computer Science
      tinguely@plains.NoDak.edu
CC:   FreeBSD Multimedia Group
      freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org

Dear Mr. Reddy:

This is in response to your phone message left on my voice mail August 20.
I am summarizing the phone message to answer your questions, and to inform the
FreeBSD mailing list members which are receiving a carbon copy of this mail.

In the phone called you mentioned that OMT sells a "Meteor" capture card
clone, that you sell other video products, that your company has a web
page that displays the products (http://www.otm.com/), that you would
be interested in FreeBSD drivers for some of your other products and finally
that you are interested in information about the drivers for your literature.

We, the FreeBSD multimedia group, have been aware of the Sequence P1S for over
a year. I have your web page listed for the Sequence P1S and Talisman
MPEG Decoder on a FreeBSD video capture web page
 (http://www.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu/~tinguely/mbone-freebsd/video.html).

The Meteor/Sequence P1S are good cards, but the Philips SAA7116, which
is the digital video to PCI interface to these boards, causes an illegal
PCI sequence when used with newer PCI buses. As a remedy, the FreeBSD people
that wanted to use video capture devices with Pentium Pro computers developed
drivers for adapters for the Brooktree BT484 chipset.

I mention the above to illustrate that because FreeBSD multimedia development
is done by volunteers, we usually choose products that will work on the latest
equipment. If an adapter will not work with the current technology, I would
not expect to get a driver written. I still mention the Sequence P1S, BUT
I also list the limitation that can not work in the newer PCI buses. If
Philips fixes the SAA7116, I will remove the listed limitation.

The "meteor" driver source code is distributed with source code for FreeBSD.
To enable the software, the user needs to edit the kernel configuration file
and add:

device meteor0

after compiling, installing and rebooting the kernel the capture card is ready
to work. We include a few simple sample C programs that illustrate changing
the camera input ports, and the different capturing modes. The, code necessary
to use the meteor with the MBONE video conferencing tool, "vic", is included
in the distributed sources for vic.

New device drivers for FreeBSD is the hardest of your questions. The FreeBSD
multimedia development group is a loosely organized group of collaborators.
In general, a board is initially supported because the developer has a need for
that category of board (video, audio, MPEG, etc). For example, I can see that
a future need a *real time* MPEG I or MPEG II capture board will be in demand
in the multimedia group when the price of the MPEG processing chip fall.

I think there are a couple things that may help you get people in the FreeBSD
multimedia group to support more of your products:

1) give free, or discount the price of a few boards.

2) we NEED documentation on the chipsets used and the operation of the boards.
   Matrox Meteor driver is the perfect example of getting NO information
   from a company (Matrox). The meteor driver exists only because of excellent
   documantation from Philips.

3) try to get a two or three people to take on a project instead of one person.
   we are doing these drivers for work or on our own time, but only as a
   part time basis. Having more than one person working on the driver helps
   fill in the gaps when others are swamped with their real work/life. Having
   more than one person is also great for motivation.

4) understand the volunteers generally support the latest and greatest
   hardware. Altruistically, we like to see more devices supported so that
   FreeBSD is used more, but we have only so much time.

5) if you are really, really, really want a board supported, you may be able
   to contract one of the FreeBSD users to do the work. Do so at your own
   risk.

This letter is intended to be an introduction between the FreeBSD group and
you, Mr Reddy. Hopefully, with this introduction we can establish a dialog
that helps you get more driver support and helps us support multimedia devices.

--mark tinguely.



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