- May 24th, 2002 - (Zsolt speaking) - I've started to upgrade docus including this website (removing broken links etc.).
- April 17th, 2002 - (Zsolt Kozak speaking) - mgavideo-0.1.0 is available here
- April 13th, 2002 - (Gernot speaking) - Zsolt Kozak (mail see his webpage) has put up a Marvel eG450 setup page. Check it out if you have a Marvel G450 !
- November 4th, 2001 - Yet another test release, nr 6,is available that
fixes a small problem with recent kernels. We're also happy to report it now
compiles and runs on Alpha. Furthermore many improvements in the DVD department,
plus the ability to prevent the driver from touching the 2nd head/tvout.
- September 26th, 2001 - Eddie Galvez has left the Marvel project as
a web maintainer and wished us the best of luck in a last mail - thanks
for establishing this site, Eddie !
- September 21st, 2001 - Surprise ! We got a complete driver (at least TV part), based on 0.1.0-test5, for the G450eTV from a guy called Ben Touchette ! More info yet to follow (ongoing discussion on the list).
- September 1st, 2001 - (Gernot) Bob McElrath sent a preliminary marvel patch for xawtv 3.61 - get it from ftp://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/pub/mjpeg/ !
- August 8, 2001 - (Leon) The
latest test5 release fixes some compilation
problems on 2.4.5+ kernels, and also includes a few minor enhancements.
- March 31, 2001 - (Leon) Some problems with audio should be fixed in the
current test release (number 4). Support for the DVD add-on has also improved
significantly (thanks inkling!).
- March 14th, 2001 - (Gernot) Jeffrey Ingber releases a new xawtv patch - get it from ftp://mjpeg.sourceforge.net !
- February 11, 2001 - (Leon) Another test release (number 3) is available
for download. The driver merge is getting close to completion; this time
there's (preliminary) support for the DVD Add-on. It should also compile a
bit easier on 2.2 kernels that have the new I2C interface.
- January 12th, 2001 - (Gernot) If you have problems with the compilation on a SuSE system,
please check out Marvel/SuSE tips (in German).
- January 12th, 2001 - Gernot will reduce his efforts in the
Marvel/Linux project to a minimum. You are still welcome to mail him,
though.
- December 27th, 2000 - (Leon) Release 0.1.0-test2 is now
available, with most notably improved MJPEG and SMP support; check it
out!
- October 11th, 2000 - (Gernot) Leon Stuivenberg has made some images of his G400 and G200 cards: Please check out http://noomore.org/mga/ if you are interested !
- September 18, 2000 - (Gernot) Thanks to Leon Stuivenberg, PAL
playback is now working correctly on the G200 ! The G200 & RRG
combination can now be considered as fully supported.
- September 5th, 2000 - (Gernot) I've got MJPEG playback and
recording working on my machine, thanks to all-time hero Mike Bernson
:) ... The PAL playback has still flipped back colors, but that will
certainly be solved soon ...
- September 5th, 2000 - G400 CVS testers: Please check the Bug
workaround on Marvel/Linux docs (see Documentation) to see if that
works better for you ...
- September 5th, 2000 - (Gernot) Please check out the new doc snippets you can find on Marvel/Linux docs.
I would be happy if someone else could take over there, I am not
especially suited as a half-developer, since I don't see problems from
a user's point of view ...
- September 5th, 2000 - (Gernot speaking) Things are currently
moving quickly - not always towards "more stable", but that's at least
the main direction - like the stock market ;) ... Mike has changed his
equipment to a G200 & RRG, and will now cooperate with me to first
get the G200 combinations (G200 & RRG, Marvel G200) stable, and
then move on to the G400 cards again ... so:
(Mike's comment) G400 is not supported yet......It will be as soon at I
get
G200 + RRG mpjeg stuff fixed. (I have a system very close
to yours dual PIII 733, G400MAx + RRG).
- September 5th, 2000 - (Gernot speaking) There have been
demands for a new release - we thought that we would make one in May,
but the driver turned out to demand a lot more fixing than expected,
and is still not stable (and the merger with the DVD module code throw
us back some weeks, too) - we are working as hard as we can, and will
inform you on this page & the mailing list as soon as a new release
is available ! In the meanwhile, you can check out the CVS code, and
send us huuuge bug reports ;)
- September 3rd, 2000 - (Gernot speaking) I eliminated the
annoying audio noise bug when switching TV channels. ... if there are
still problems, please tell me ... we still have some occasional write
errors in msp3400.c, so you could experience temporary muting ... the
TV support is now working perfectly with my G200 & RRG, so if there
are problems left with watching TV in xawtv, then they are bugs, and
not features ;)
BTW: I added some info in the README about reducing the video card
memory available to the X server, to avoid mouse cursor garbling.. - September 2st, 2000 - Added a short summary of the main developers' hardware. (see below)
- September 2st, 2000 - the CVS code is still very shakey.
Sorry about the inconvenience, but we believe that this is going to
speed up development - we really want to get this MJPEG and TV-out
stuff working :-)
- August 19th, 2000 - Playback code is working, but still _very_ unstable ...
- August 10th, 2000 - Things are moving... slowly but surely.
What's going on right now is a major merging of various codes back into
a 'stable' mgavideo driver. We are even tackling things like having the
RRG and the DVD module at the same time! Psst - don't forget for the
cvs you want to check out the module called 'driver'
- July 11th, 2000 - (eddie) Waouh, people really want this driver :) As
noted on the old homepage we (the old page) are 7th in the
links2go
repository for "Linux video" resources...
- July 9th, 2000 - Thanks to Petr Vandrovec, video signals can be sent to the
TV out now. PAL signal only for the moment. Works as a passthrough for the
incoming video.
- May 13th, 2000 - audio input is now routed to audio out when using
composite or S-VHS. (valid for the latest CVS version)
- May 11th, 2000 - we have switched to Sourceforge's CVS ... have a look
at our new Marvel CVS
archive (the modulename is "driver"). At the same time, if you still
bookmark http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~eddie/mga4linux you can consider this
the permanent web replacement for that page.. no need to get anyone confused here!
- May 11th, 2000 - Benoit Mathieu has written a document about
the future considerations that need to be done to implement a unified
driver that uses all the advanced features of the MGA G-series
extensions (backend scaler, DVD module, Rainbow Runner/Marvel). Have a look at it !
- May 6th, 2000 - CVS is back up again.
- May 6th, 2000 - Revolutionary breakthrough ! Mike's hard work
has paid off, and he has made compression work, with the right colors (see
example JPEG and example AVI,
recorded with lavrec,
thanks to Rainer Johanni from Buz/Linux for the tip !).
This means that there are no
"technological hinders" for fully working MJPEG support anymore !
- May 5th, 2000 - Secret sources have told me that MJPEG compression has
worked in first experimental tries .... The colors are still wrong, and
the picture is not centered, but there is a picture !
- May 5th, 2000 - Thanks to Benoit, the TV quality has improved
tremendously ! Unfortunately, uncompressed grabbing had to be "sacrificed"
for the moment....
- May 5th, 2000 - CVS is down ! :-(
- May 5th, 2000 - I got pointed to that audio in is not working at the
moment - will fix quite soon !
- April 24, 2000 - MJPEG breakthrough ! For two days ago I
succeeded with making mgavideo recognize the Zoran 36060 JPEG codec on
my RRG ! This means that I'm back in the game for MJPEG development
.... unfortunately I have two maths tests to do before I can get back
to work again, but Mike Bernson has already started and started MJPEG
development again - the future for using the Marvel/RRG under Linux is
looking bright again !
- April 24, 2000 - We would like to welcome
Benoit Mathieu in
the mgavideo development team ! He has already been contributing some
patches in two of his work-intensive weekend sessions, and he is
currently working on improving the preview window quality, and
afterwards he will probably concentrate on MJPEG support...
- April 3, 2000 - Found and inserted the link for the old Rainbow
Runner/Linux site.
- April 3, 2000 - (Gernot speaking) Sorry that there hasn't been any
release for a long while, but nobody felt like it was release time,
although the module has improved quite a bit (TV tuner support for PAL
countries, TV audio is now audible). Maybe I can convince myself to make
some release soon, in the meanwhile please use the CVS version, it should
always be working (if not, yell on the list). I am currently working as
fast as I can on Motion JPEG support (MJPEG), but it isn't easy to
implement (the Iomega Buz driver source code, for example, has a size of
100kb !), and I introduced modularity at the same time, to make it
possible to share code between the different forthcoming MJPEG drivers.
So, the project has not been abandoned, we are still working on it :)
- Feb 18, 2000 - Besides the LiViD-developer list, there is also a small
marvel-linux list. Just click on the link to subscribe and/or access the
archives. (Do you feel the power of sourceforge already ? I do ;) )
- Feb 17, 2000 - The TV tuner audio output is
working now ! Basically, it is now possible to watch TV - It is still
flakey though (e.g. the volume control doesn't work), and
therefore it will be released later - if you really want to be "on the
edge", check out our CVS (see below on how to access it)
- Feb 16, 2000 - The CVS version now also supports PAL and won't make your
computer crash, if you own a RRG ... The Marvel G400-TV has also been seen
to be half-working, so don't give up the hope !
- Feb 6, 2000 -
Made an update to the internals-page below ...
- Jan 30, 2000 - Have a
look at the the Rainbow Runner internals !.
- Jan 29, 2000 - uploaded this site to marvel.sourceforge.net - not
complete
at all, but just wait some days and you'll see ! /gz :)
- Jan 24, 2000 -
Rumor time! Even though most specs are available, except with
regards to the Maven chip, TV-Out has apparently been coded for linux! :)
It was reverse-engineered and
should make it into mgavideo sometime in the near future...
- Jan 16, 2000
- Release 0.0.8 of mgavideo! Some info is
coming in about BSD licensing too, but anyone with knowledge in that area
feel free to contact me. Also, some new stuff regarding SVGA Textmode.
- Jan 15, 2000 - Ok, back from winter break, and not much new. FreeBSD
licensing is being looked into, some people have come up with intents to
help... I'll get to specifics as soon as it's worth... Dec 18 - Woo it's
been a long time. I was in middle of finals, and many other things that I
just couldn't look at all this. Here's some late stuff that's been going
on:
- Wesley Hosking (wes@atlantek.com.au) recommends we
look at the Buz driver, which allows MJPEG capturing. The differences
between each card is supposed to be minimal...
- Tom Zerucha
(tz@execpc.com) wrote a patch for Mystique/Millennium/G200 and now all
Gx00 series cards for SVGATextMode at http://www.execpc.com/~tz/G200SVGT.patch against
SVGATextMode-1.8. The patch for full Gx00 series is now available: update patch (diff)
- Kyosti Malkki (kmalkki@cc.hut.fi) and Justin Schoeman
are porting the bttv driver to V4L2, and are writing generic support for
audio processors like the msp34xx. pre-CVS code at http://www.hut.fi/~kmalkki/bttv.
- Can we get the code
portable to FreeBSD? We seem to have some people who want that... I have
no FreeBSD experience. Anyone?
- Oct 16 - Work is being done to get
mgavideo to work on the "old" (non G-series) Rainbow Runner studio by Isaac Connor ; Status page
- We'd like to hear from reports of mgavideo running under Alpha, and of
people using the TV-Addon.
- A graduate student at Rochester U. wrote an
"An Abstraction to the Matrox Meteor Driver under Linux"
which could be interesting
- Some MGAvideo news (see section below)
Ok - what's this simple-looking-page all
about?
Well, what we are trying to do here is to somehow bring
together in one place all efforts to have the Matrox Marvel's work under
linux, for tv viewing, capture, tv/out, and video/in.
You can have mgavideo work (in preview mode via preview_on) on a
framebuffer console by setting the colorkey to 0 (tested on a 1024*768*32bpp matroxfb)
mgavideo 0.0.4+ will give you video, provided that you:
a) Run Xwindows at 1024*768 , 16bpp. Other depths might work
adding '-b' to xcaptest. It should be needed only for 32bpp, not
24bpp. Other resolutions might not work, yet. Furthermore, only XFree86 3.3.3.1 SVGA has been tested. Any reports from the FB server welcome.
b)
If you have problems (mostly "unresolved symbols" loading modules,
starting with mgavideo.o) , add to the CFLAGS in the Makefile the
following: "-DMODVERSIONS -include
/usr/src/linux/include/linux/modversions.h"
- most Redhat/Mandrake distros will need this.
c) If you don't have /dev/video* and /dev/i2c* you need to type
'./MAKEDEV video' and './MAKEDEV i2c' in /dev as root. (although
/dev/i2c isnt needed)
The current drivers display video coming in from the video-in
connectors and fom the TV-Tuner. No audio yet. Although that should be
easy to add. Release 0.0.4 does not use the backend scaler, and so
video is displayed as fast as your software can copy the images to the
screen. Gerard Horst managed to get the backend scaler working, and
his code is to be added. (Privately, it's working and runs
perfect.)
Want to get TVOut working quickly? Please run this tool (for Win95/98) (read the readme's!) and report to us!
Straight from Ryan:
If you see green bands of corruption on the bottom of your desktop
this is definitely because you are running in a resolution higher than
1024x768x16bpp. Getting this driver to work with all resolutions is
currently #1 priority for me. Anyone who wants to get that corruption
off the screen, try messing with the values _VINADDR0, _VBIADDR0,
_VINADDR1, and _VBIADDR1 in mgavideo.c. Add about 0x100000 to each of
the values. These will have to be configured on the fly eventually,
depending on what resolution you are running.
The select() timeout problem which makes you unload and reload the
driver is another priority 1 for me. I'm still trying to isolate which
module is not initializing properly.
Sep 1: mgavideo work will slow down a little; I've received news that
are promising, but at the same time not so good. I can't really go
into the details, but the situation seems to be that work continues on
Matrox Marvel support, but at the present times it's behind the scenes...
