Linux 5.10 Media Changes Bring A New "Vidtv" Virtual Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Multimedia on 14 October 2020 at 12:00 AM EDT. 2 Comments
MULTIMEDIA
The media subsystem of the Linux kernel is seeing a number of changes with the in-development Linux 5.10.

The media changes for Linux 5.10 are a bit more interesting than usual, including:

- The "Zoran" driver has been revived after previously being dropped from staging. Zoran was removed from staging in April of 2019 as it was deprecated at that point for already a year and no activity in porting it to the VB2 framework. But thanks to Corentin Labbe of BayLibre this driver has been revived and is now back in staging along with many improvements to its code. The old Zoran 36057/36067 PCI hardware is able to offer (M)JPEG support via Video 4 Linux interfaces.

- The USBVision driver meanwhile was dropped from staging for lack of maintenance to it. The USBVision driver is for various USB video devices with chipsets from Nogatech and Zoran.

- Continued work on the AtomISP driver after that recent Intel driver revival.

- Vidtv is added as a new virtual DVB driver for testing the Linux media subsystem as well as serving as a reference for driver writers targeting the various kernel media APIs. The Vidtv effort should also help in testing the digital TV framework and associated APIs. Vidtv includes the likes of a fake tuner driver, a fake demod driver, and a fake bridge driver.

- Documentation improvements to the media area.

- The Mediatek VPU driver now supports the MT8183 SoC that is used by the likes of the Lenovo 10E Chromebook.

- The Venus driver now supports the VP9 video codec.

- Various other smaller improvements throughout the subsystem.

More details on the media changes for Linux 5.10 via this pull request.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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