FM Radio Tuners in Feisty

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I upgraded to Feisty about a month or so ago, and it has been a nice improvement so far. One regression I noticed though was that my USB FM radio tuner had stopped working (or at least, Gnomeradio could no longer tune it).

It turns out that some time between the kernel release found in Edgy and the one found in Feisty, the dsbr100 driver had been upgraded from the Video4Linux 1 API to Video4Linux 2. Now the driver nominally supports the V4L1 ioctls through the v4l1_compat, but it doesn’t seem to implement enough V4L2 ioctls to make it usable (the VIDIOCGAUDIO ioctl fails).

To work around this, I ported the tuner code in Gnomeradio over to V4L2. The patch can be found attached to bug 429005. I don’t know if this patch will go in as is though, since it only works for drivers supporting V4L2. Perhaps it’d be worth supporting both APIs, using V4L2 if both are supported.

This Post Has 7 Comments

  1. Max

    Argg, we need V4L and V4L2 Support in Gstreamer…

  2. James Henstridge

    Max: there are v4lsrc and v4l2src elements in Gstreamer already. However, they don’t really handle V4L/V4l2 radio devices, where you’ve only got a tuner and no audio/video inputs.

  3. Xav

    I think v4l device are automatically handled as v4l2 by the kernel (but I may be mistaken).

  4. n8

    Out of raw, unabashed curiosity — which USB FM radio tuner do you use?

  5. James Henstridge

    n8: it is a D-Link DSB-R100 USB tuner. It does all the basic things, but doesn’t report signal strength (which means that apps can’t scan forward for stations).

  6. gizmo

    I use avermedia GO 007 tv tuner card
    I could use gnomeradio on dapper, but I cant use it on Fiesty…

    can anyone suggest me anything?

  7. James Henstridge

    gizmo: have you tried the patch attached to the bug report I mentioned in the main article? The gnomeradio in feisty is incapable of tuning my radio hardware, so may be incapable of tuning yours too.

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