amiga-news.de - AmithlonTV looking for programmers!

12.Oct.2002
Guido Mersmann (ANF)

AmithlonTV looking for programmers!
Programmers wanted!

We need people for AmithlonTV who know how to code, who have knowledge of TV cards (bt8x8, SAT, DVB, ...), who own one and who are willing to write drivers for the single components.

This is how things are right now:

We have a three layers drivers system. On the lowest level there's a text file that follows a library serving as interface to applications. This library calls single sub drivers.

The drivers system behind the library is chip based. Simply spoken there's not a driver for each card but for each chip. The advantage is that the user has just to change a text file and makes an entry there containing the chips that are on his card and his TV card will already work. Missing components are of no importance in most cases. Is there no tuner does this mean that the application doesn't have any, either. So a driver for a particular chip works without any adaptation with different cards.

The library is kept that flexible that it can deal with as many TV cards simultaneously as you like. And as many applications as you like can share one single TV card what is very practically e.g for video recorders, TV and web cam. This way it will be switched between the applications if needed. E. g. a web cam application can interrupt a TV application for doing a snapshot but it cannot do this with the video recorder application.

In contrary to the main library that is already working very well there's much work to be done on the external components. There's no real TV application, yet. There's a small test version showing the possibilities and being used for testing purposes but it doesn't really offer functionality.

It's even worse with the chip drivers. To date there are only the drivers for the Medion TV card (MD 9592) existing. That means that an audio driver, a tuner driver and the bt8x8 are existing. The bt8x8 driver should be capable in creating and displaying an image on all TV cards using a BrookTree chip. Especially the bt8x8 support causes still quite some trouble and I could need specialist knowledge.

This may all now sound very complicated but it isn't as the complex things are all implemented in the tvcard.library with the drivers themselves being very small. The sub library for the tuner is for the time being not even 2 Kb in size!

Urgently needed are:

Drivers for as many chips as possible.
A TV application with a nice GUI using Reaction or skins.
A video recorder application.

Capabilities that you should have:

C knowledge.
68K knowledge are of advantage.
Library coding (the chip drivers are normal libraries with four functions).
Knowledge of the single chips are very advisable.

What can't be expected:

AmithlonTV is not commercial and it is not supposed to become in the future. Therefore there'll be no payment. With this call I want to push the development that is going on only slowly until now.

Interested people may contact me!

Guido Mersmann (ps) (Translation: wk)

[News message: 12. Oct. 2002, 21:38] [Comments: 2 - 14. Oct. 2002, 16:07]
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