DVB coming to Haiku

In August 2005 I had some major disagreement with Bernd Korz, former CEO of YellowTab, the company that was developing and selling Zeta. Zeta was meant to be successor of BeOS R5. Since a few weeks, it looks like Zeta is dead and won't be continued.

I very much believe that Haiku is becoming the only replacement and successor of BeOS R5 now. It's already very useable, and can run a variety of BeOS R5 Applications, like for example Wonderbrush.

It's was in July 2005 when I finished the first useable package of DVB-T support for BeOS. Later I dropped supporting it because of the problems described above. But guess what, the BeOS R5 DVB-T package already runs on Haiku, too.

Compared to BeOS, Haiku is still lacking a live TV input. BeOS R5 included a driver for BT878 analogous TV, Haiku as of today hasn't one. I don't have any analogous TV anymore, so I can't change that.

I've therefore decided that I'll do a checkin of my DVB-T sources into the Haiku source tree. Including driver, media-add-on and TV application. The audio and video codecs that I used with BeOS and Zeta will not be included. Haiku allready has all required codecs. This means some porting work after the initial checkin, to utilize the Haiku media kit in the way it's meant to be used. DVB will then use the Haiku codecs by means of the BMediaDecoder class.

It might be possible to get DVB-S support (Skystar 2 card) for Haiku in the future, by means of a third party driver. However, this is undecided so far.

Serial ATA support for AHCI devices, as mentioned in a blog posting in January is still beeing worked on.

I managed to find a few old screenshots from DVB-T on BeOS, it will look simlar on Haiku.

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4

(The screenshots were done utilizing two DVB-T cards)