XC5000: Now with faster tuning and power management!

For those of you who might be reading this blog because of an interest in developments on the HVR-950q or the Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro 801e, you might want to check the linux-media mailing list. Tonight I announced a beta release of the xc5000 changes I have been working on since last August. Here are the highlights:

• Power management is now properly supported - no more sucking up your laptop battery and burning your fingers on the tuner's f-connector when the device is idle (can be disabled with the "no_poweroff"
  modprobe option).
  
• Faster tuning - average 10x improvement in time to lock. Average lock time now around 350ms, down from 3200ms. No more multi-second delays when trying to channel surf in tvtime.
  
• Redistributable firmware - Xceive has graciously allowed us to redistribute the firmware and bundle it in the distros. No more need for users to manually extract the blob from the Hauppauge Windows driver.
  

This was the product of months of debugging race conditions, dozens of emails with Xceive, and testing against essentially every xc5000-based product currently supported under Linux.

I look forward to feedback from testers, and will be glad to finally get closure on this series of patches.