Talk:DVD and Enhanced Video Adapter (DEVA)

Tonko,

Thanks for adding your input. Just wondered if you remember more about what you tried when you played with the SAA7111A driver, and how far you got. As far as I can tell the chip is a codec attached to the Trident chipset, meaning any driver would have to know how the cyber9397DVD video capture worked and be able to use an i2c interface to the Philips chip.

For the TV out section I'll have a go at confirming what you can/can't do at some point, but no TV will make it tricky!

As for the DVD half I didn't know about that driver---interesting indeed. Again though, it's how you'd actually talk to it. Under Win98 It does actually show up as a PCI device, and has a "PCI-ish" IRQ and memory range. Invisible under linux, though.

User:lentinj

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The last 770 model was withdrawn in December 1999, and I have not touched or seen one since early 2001.

I have had 2 different 770 models, the last being a 770X, and as you understood I had the DEVA as you do. I messed around with Linux on it at the time, and just for heck tried loading the saa7111 driver. I recall that it loaded sucessfully, but did not return any messages in syslog (that I recall), and I was not able to do anything with it.

As you mentioned, if indeed it is i2c connected to the Trident Cyber9397 or Cyber9397DVD, then you would probably first need a i2c bus driver for the Trident chip, before the saa7111 driver could even find the chip.

The problem is that this ThinkPad has been withdrawn more then 5 years ago, and the DEVA card was rare even when the 770's where still current, meaning that by now I think you will have problems finding other Linux users who have both a 770 and DEVA.

Mix that with the fact that the Linux community is having problems getting specifications for current ThinkPad technologies (HDD shock detection, fingerprint reader), making it very unlikely that you will be able to find someone at IBM (or now Lenovo) who can get you the specs, meaning you are looking at a reverse-engineering project from the windows drivers.
And such projects typically require an active user community, not something you have.

Tonko

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Fair enough. I was always aware that I'm quite rare in still using a 770x on a daily basis, ignoring the enhanced video adaptor... Hell, it still works fine and plenty fast enough for me.

Not to worry---I wasn't ever expecting to do anything useful with the adaptor, but it's still an amusing diversion every now and again (hell, it's not properly supported with win2k, let alone linux). The i2c driver could be massaged out of the trident XServer, but that still doesn't help in actually capturing the video.

Thanks anyway!

User:lentinj