From owner-freebsd-multimedia Thu Mar 11 6:21:39 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Received: from fan.net.au (fan.net.au [203.20.92.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B18E2152EB for ; Thu, 11 Mar 1999 06:21:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from q@fan.net.au) Received: from gromit.fan.net.au (gromit.fan.net.au [203.23.133.34]) by fan.net.au (8.9.1/8.9.1) with SMTP id AAA10259; Fri, 12 Mar 1999 00:21:04 +1000 (EST) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 00:21:04 +1000 (EST) From: Q To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Cc: ulf@Alameda.net, Ryan Dewalt , freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Creative Labs DVD Dxr2 In-Reply-To: <72974.921137745@zippy.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > Jordan posted an email address of a Taiwan CL person, who had promised > > programming documentations. Try to poke that person again. > > I don't think that will do any good at this point. They don't > appear to be answering. > I contacted this person and got a response from him fairly quickly, unfortunately Creative's official position at this time is that they only support the Windows MCI API for third party access to the card. Which doesn't help at all. I am currently doing research into the likelyhood of completing support for the Dxr2 card (ie. researching required information not code hacking). From what I have discovered, all the components used on the Dxr2 board have downloadable documentation except one. The ZiVA-DS DVD decoder chip, this is the brains of the board and without technical information about the chip it looks unlikely that FreeBSD support will be possible. From what I can gather, the Dxr2 board is based on the Auravision Universal DVD card, with only a couple of components differing slightly. Auravision sell a development kit to manufacturers that includes windows drivers. Unfortunately, to get the ZiVA-DS documentation and source code you still need to speak directly to C-Cube. Who only give it out at their discression. So it seems to be a well kept secret. I have tried to contact C-Cube through various channels in an attempt to obtain information about the ZiVA-DS chipset but have hit dead ends every time. Anyone inside the US is encouraged to persue this. Being in Australia has made things difficult. I have also seen a couple of reports from Linux developers that C-Cube have refused to give them programming information because it is "proprietry" and not for public distribution. I am not sure on the legalities yet, but I plan to make an attempt at trying to reverse engineer/trace parts of the Creative windows DVD player to see if it is possible to derive enough information about the ZiVA-DS decoder to proceed with the project. For the moment, reverse engineering is the only option. I don't know what the legalities are yet, but the result of such an effort would be an adhoc programming spec. Which would be used to implement a clean room device driver for FreeBSD. I know that the UK have "product compatability" related laws that make reversing legal. I am still learning a lot of new stuff as I investigate this (mostly about the internals of windows). DVD support fgor FreeBSD is a commercial sized project. Things that need to be done before DVD will happen on FreeBSD includes UDF support, CSS key negotiation support in the ATAPI CDROM driver, Dxr2 video overlay driver, Dxr2 TV/Out driver, C-Cube ZiVA-DS driver, implementation of a full DVD navigator. I would be interested to discuss this with anyone interested in commencing with such a project. Seeya...Q -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- _____ / Quinton Dolan - q@fan.net.au __ __/ / / __/ / / Systems Administrator / __ / _/ / / Fast Access Network __/ __/ __/ ____/ / - / Gold Coast, QLD, Australia _______ / Ph: +61 7 5574 1050 \_\ SAGE-AU Member To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message