v4l-dvb-experimental and v4l-dvb-makomk are dying

Edit: I’ve now backported the neccesary changes to v4l-dvb-makomk in order to make it compile on 2.6.24 (it was actually easier than I expected).

In case you haven’t noticed, both Markus’ v4l-dvb-experimental and my v4l-dvb-makomk are slowly dying. (v4l-dvb-experimental can be coerced to compile on modern kernels, but is old and unsupported; v4l-dvb-makomk is worse, since it doesn’t even compile on 2.6.24). So what should you use?

• For non-em28xx based devices that use the xc3028 tuner, try http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/ – support for that tuner and probably most of these devices has been added to here. If there’s anything of this sort that v4l-dvb-experimental supports and v4l-dvb doesn’t, it should be easy to add, and there may even be another tree at http://linuxtv.org/ that does support it (e.g. http://linuxtv.org/hg/~mkrufky/cx88-xc2028/). Try asking on the appropriate mailing list. (v4l-dvb-makomk never supported any of these devices, so if you’re reading this you probably don’t have one.)
• For em28xx-based devices (what v4l-dvb-makomk supported), you have a choice:
  • If you only want analog you’re lucky, your device may be supported by http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/ – it even supports digital on some devices. You can find a list of supported devices here, though other hardware may work with some small changes – try asking the developers.
  • You can carry on using v4l-dvb-makomk, though I can’t make any guarantees about what’ll happen when 2.6.25 is released. It should now work on 2.6.24 if it did on earlier versions, which for most hardware was the case. Please poke either me or one of the main linuxtv developers about adding support for your device to the main linuxtv driver.
  • Finally, some hardware may require you using one of Markus’ driver versions. v4l-dvb-experimental is in a pretty bad state and getting worse, but there’s probably some hardware that’s not supported by anything else. Note that there’s no one driver version that I can recommend – they all have different caveats, and I don’t think there’s any one version that supports all the hardware that the rest do.