MMInputFamily 0.8.4 review

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In order to use Mac Digital TV / HDTV applications such as iTele, you need a driver that is a member of the MMInput family of device drivers.

License: Freeware
OS: Mac OS X
File size: 1038K
Developer: John Dalgliesh
Price: $0.00
Updated: 26 May 2006
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In order to use Mac Digital TV / HDTV applications such as iTele, you need a driver that is a member of the MMInput family of device drivers.

This family has been created to support multimedia input devices such as Digital TV cards. It is called the 'MultiMedia Input Family' because its use is not restricted to Digital TV applications alone: DVB and its cousins like ATSC promise all sorts of other media goodies, such as interactive TV shows (vote with your remote), IP over the air (internet downloads), data channels (weather/stockmarket), near video on demand (movie starts every half hour), and many others. Hopefully the MMInputFamily will eventually be adopted by writers of commercial drivers or Apple, but we could be waiting a while for that.

What's New:
Download the MultiMedia Input Family and Drivers v0.8.4 package from 17/5/2006
Ported all drivers and UDMarket to the Intel X86 architecture. Was irritating but straightforward. (Mustn't have been too hard since I managed to get it working without an Intel machine to test it on.) The full complement of BEUInt32, LEUInt32 and plain-old UInt32 plus other sizes are now available in FTypes.hpp using funky assembler inlines for speed.
Change above required updating to XCode 2.2 and gcc 4.0. Since the latest gcc mangles ObjC qualifiers differently (it's a bug), some hacks were required to keep the wire protocol unchanged. I believe I have succeeded here, i.e. older versions of iTele (incl over network) should remain compatible with these new drivers.
MMInputShims in UDMarket now listen for sleep notifications. Before the system goes to sleep, they withdraw their goods from the market, deactivate their device and invalidate any remaining clients. When the system wakes back up, they vend their goods on the market again. This means that finally a system with active devices will survive sleep, even if they are streaming! The withdrawal/revending is necessary for remote clients (who aren't sleeping with us), and although it's a little annoying for local clients it's actually a whole lot saner and a case that the clients (i.e. iTele) should deal with anyway.
Beta version of support for the LGDT3303 as found in the FusionHDTV 5 ATSC PCI card and USB box (LGH064F tuner only).
The LGDT330X driver now supports selecting between 8VSB and QAM64/256 by setting the Constellation tuning parameter (to a number: 64/256=QAM; other=VSB).
Beta driver for the TwinHan MagicBox Pro (using ULi M9207). Having problems talking to the tuner.
Support for the UltraView DVB-T Lite PCI board.
Attempted to get TT-Budget 1500 to work but gave up and had to return card. Some architectural improvements in the TDA1004X driver resulted from this at any rate.
Attempted to update to the latest firmwares for the DVICO FusionHDTV USB DVB-T box. I may still have selected the wrong one however since there are multiple versions inside the Windows driver now.
Made a dummy PCI driver called DeepSleeper to attach to unused ConexantCX2388X PCI functions, since in Mac OS X 10.4.2 (and possibly later systems too) deep sleep is no longer possible unless all functions are matched. Very annoying.

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